Netflix: Why debut a show called Trial By Media when Tiger King is already trial-by-media?

By Jim Slotek

“So, do you think Carole Baskin killed her husband?”

This is not the kind of question that normally accompanies a reality-series ostensibly about saving animals. 

But it is just another day talking about Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness, Netflix’s wallow-in-the-mud reality series about the strange (and in some cases deranged), folk in the cut-throat world of roadside big-cat attractions.

Carole Baskin: Did she kill her husband? The police say no, but the producers say… yes.

I don’t think I’ve discussed the show with anyone who didn’t start with that question. Baskin, an animal rights activist who runs Big Cat Rescue in Florida, is the enemy of the title character, a desperately self-promoting Oklahoma cat keeper named Joseph Maldonado-Passage (a.k.a. Joe Exotic). A “character” indeed, Joe had two husbands (both of whom claimed to be straight), released Milli Vanilli style lip-synched country videos and ran for state governor, allegedly misusing park funds for his campaign. Nic Cage has been announced to play him in a movie, which seems perfect.

On the dumber end of criminality, Joe was convicted of trying to arrange Baskin’s murder, with the extenuating evidence of online videos where he’d rant profanely about her and pull stunts like blowing the head off her effigy with a shotgun.

But Tiger King creators Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaiklin gave plenty of time to Joe’s rants about Baskin having allegedly killed her first husband, a former owner of her park, who is officially thought to have fled creditors and is living in Costa Rica. Law enforcement officers - fielding a new wave of tips - still say there’s no evidence he was murdered.

Joe Exotic and friend

So, here’s irony for you. Even as Tiger King plays out its unexpected 15 minutes as COVID-19 comfort food, Netflix, on May 8, is debuting Trial by Media, a documentary series about media circuses surrounding various crimes over the past three decades.

Executive produced by George Clooney, the series is like any other “watch this” TV car crash, except for the clucking sound of disapproval. The opening episode plants us in the ‘90s, the decade that first gave us “ambush TV” (Jerry Springer, Geraldo, Jenny Jones, Sally Jessy Raphael, Maury Povich) and also launched Court TV, which turned the legal system into a form of voyeuristic entertainment.

It focuses on the most famous Jenny Jones episode, in 1995, in which a 23-year-old named Jonathan Schmitz ended up murdering a fellow guest after taping an episode that promised to reveal his “secret admirer.” The admirer turned out to be a gay acquaintance named Scott Amedure. Schmitz, feeling he’d been humiliated on national TV, killed Amedure with a shotgun three days later at Amedure’s trailer park.

Next to O.J., the “talk show murder” trial was Court TV’s biggest boost – a two-fer that included coverage of the actual murder trial and a subsequent civil suit on behalf of Amedure’s family.

And like Tiger King or Wild Wild Country (about the Oregon commune started by the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh), this series introduces you to colourful characters, like the high-priced legal cut-throat Jeffrey Fieger (whose specialty was leveling searing accusations at witnesses and making them sound like questions).

Trial By Media: Jonathan Schmitz in cuffs after murdering a fellow talk show guest.

The high-horse that Trial by Media sits upon doesn’t prevent it from showing us, either in clips or montages, many of the most famous incidents of human debasement from this genre of TV (including “you are NOT the father” DNA moments and Geraldo Rivera’s infamous Nazi chair brawl).

In that sense, it reminds me of old Hollywood’s love of Biblical epics, which allowed studios to depict sin and orgies in the process of remaining perfectly acceptable to churchgoers.

There is, similarly, nothing new about Tiger King and the sneer it brings to its low-rent real-life characters – like Honey Boo Boo with lions and tigers and meth. 

As tempting as it is to want to feel better about ourselves these days, even at someone else’s expense, I can’t help but feel the attitude in these shows is partly responsible for the class-based resentment that gave us you-know-who as the U.S. President, in what amounted to an historic electoral act of spite.

Comfort food or not, that kind of mean-spirited fun seems just a little off-key at a moment when we’re all allegedly in this together.