The prestige podcasting era began in 2014, when the true-crime Serial gripped us with the ‘did-he-dunnit’ mystery of whether Adnan Syed had really murdered his high school girlfriend, Hae Min Lee.
With the exception of Marvel’s Avengers Assemble, it remains the decade’s most influential piece of narrative storytelling. Without Serial there is no The Jinx, no Making a Murderer, no true-crime revival full-stop, and without the success of those shows we wouldn’t have our current culture of viral documentary content — American Murder, Don’t F**k With Cats, The Devil Next Door, Wild Wild Country, My Octopus Teacher; shows you watch slack-jawed with amazement, eyes out on stalks at humanity’s capacity to willingly plunge itself into pure insanity.
Speaking of Tiger King, what is it about the pairing of big cats and bad hairdos that fills me with a lurching, queasy sense of impending physical catastrophe? It came up again in Wild Things, a new high-budget podcast from the filmmaker and journalist Steven Leckart.
One of the two performed emergency mouth-to-muzzle resuscitation on the tiger cub
It retells the story of the magical duo Siegfried and Roy, whose blockbuster Vegas show revolved around performing illusions involving wild animals, and every mention of either the beasts or the bouffants left me feeling anxious and carsick. Tiger and mullet, tiger and mullet: they go together like finger and gullet.
In the 1980s, when Siegfried and Roy arrived in Las Vegas, the days of the headline magic act were supposed to be over. The duo bucked the trend by bringing a mittel-European sincerity to their ultra-camp extravaganza, whose most famous illusion involved making a 400lb Siberian tiger disappear.
The duo told the world’s press that they shared a familial bond with their tigers, which seem to have been their great personal passion as well as their greatest commercial draw.
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