Assuming anyone still remembers him, NBC's Joe Exotic TV show is going straight to Peacock
Gather round, children, for a tale about the first week of the pandemic. Sports were canceled, people hoarded toilet paper, and Netflix released docu-series about weirdos in Florida that were breeding, trading, and imprisoning endangered big cats.
It’s been approximately three decades (15 months) since Tiger King escaped the cages of Netflix’s algorithm and took over the “discourse.” Since then, there was a gold rush for the adaptation rights, with several different ones being announced (a la the Steve Jobs movie rights of the mid-2010s). On the one hand, the showrunners of American Vandal have an adaptation starring Nicolas Cage as Exotic in the works. On the other, NBC set the stage for their own version starring John Cameron Mitchell as Exotic and Kate McKinnon as his rival, the hippy with the mysteriously missing husband Carole Baskin (though one imagines a world where McKinnon is playing Exotic, and there is no war and no one goes hungry). Interestingly enough, it seems like the latter is actually, definitely, probably coming out before the memory of Joe Exotic fades entirely.
Well, for those of you who still have a tickle of recollection of Joe Exotic, Carole Baskin, and (ready to feel old?) Doc Antle, you’ll be able to jog your memory on Peacock, which will stream the Kate McKinnon-John Cameron Mitchell version, reports Deadline. Apparently, the scripted Joe Exotic series was originally set to air on NBC and USA, as well as other NBC platforms, but that was before NBC Chairman of Entertainment Content Susan Rovener got a look at the “scripts and heard more about the producers’ vision of the show” and, presumably, said, “Nah, this one’s just for streaming.”
The series will be based on the second season of the Wondery podcast Over My Dead Body, which was also the basis for Tiger King. And, according to Rover, the new show is “a bold and provocative drama” that is “perfectly suited for Peacock, where we can push the envelope and truly bring the story to life in a way that we would be unable to do on broadcast television,” so we can assume they’ll say “fuck” on it. Nevertheless, the story does seem perfectly suited for Peacock, well, assuming anyone remembers it.