The first of the fictionalizedTiger Kingprojects is here, and it’s Peacock’sJoe vs Carole, which stars Kate McKinnon as Carole Baskin and John Cameron Mitchell as Joe Exotic, with Kyle MacLachlan as Howard Baskin, Carole’s currently living husband. The series drops the first week of March, and the trailer debuted accordingly on Friday. It’s…fine. I’m not blown out of the water, but it’s not even a minute long. Such reduction makes McKinnon seem like she’s just doing an SNL version of Baskin, but she is a decent actor, so I am willing to believe her performance is better than that. JCM looks pretty good as Joe Exotic.
Peacock is the latest “is anyone even watching this” streaming service, but they hadDr. Deathlast year, and I feel like it’s one of those really good things that got lost in the streaming shuffle. It took me ages to finish because it’s such a screaming nightmare, but the show does an excellent job portraying Christopher Duntsch’s criminal arrogance and the massive system failure that let him operate (literally) unchecked for years. I have some hope thatJoe vs Carolewill be more than an extended SNL sketch because of how well producedDr. Deathis. NBCUniversal might be way late to the streaming game, and I’m not sure they’re really advertising Peacock and everything worthwhile it has to the maximum, but they’re going to use the Olympics for a big subscriber push, thus puttingJoe vs Carolein the primo post-Olympics spot, to hopefully retain any Olympic subscribers. I sort of feel like everyone is Tiger King’d out, and they should just promoteDr. Deathand get everyone to watch that, but we’ll see how bonkers big cat people go for Peacock.
