The aptly titled Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness has—as expected—amassed a startlingly strong number of viewers on Netflix.
Early Wednesday, Nielsen released estimates for the understandably popular docuseries' first 10 days of release, with its Mar. 20-29 total coming in at 34.3 million unique viewers. As Variety noted in their report, that's enough to best Stranger Things Season 2, which saw 31.2 million unique viewers during its first 10 days of release. It's also not far behind the 36.3 million unique viewers Stranger Things Season 3 bagged across 10 days just last year.
Netflix has not yet released its own in-house viewership numbers for the seven-episode series, though the streaming platform has said that Tiger King has retained the No. 1 spot on its most popular titles chart in the U.S. for the past two weeks, which—thanks to wise people keeping their activities centered around solitude amid COVID-19—is also not exactly a shocker.
The series, which largely centers on the life and career of zookeeper and general entertainer Joe Exotic, quickly grew into a bonafide pop culture behemoth upon its release last month. At the time of this writing, everything from social distancing-inspired memes to revisits of Joe's catalog of country music videos continued to pop up with frequency online.
This week, Investigation Discovery announced a Joe-centered series of its own, which it claims will "do more than just scratch the surface" of the rivalry between the Tiger King and animal rights advocate Carole Baskin.
"It's time to let the cat out of the bag and address the lingering questions that viewers demand be answered," Henry Schleiff—Group President of Investigation Discovery, Travel Channel, American Heroes Channel, and Destination America—said in a press release announcing the sequel of sorts to the Netflix juggernaut.
