Eoin Butler: It all began with Tiger King. Then it started getting really weird

Tiger King 2 hits our screens on November 17th.

When Netflix announced a second series for its early-quarantine smash hit, it promised another round of “murder, mayhem and madness”, as well as further “stunning revelations”.

Fans of the original series will likely have regarded that with a healthy dose of scepticism. After all, neither of the principal antagonists who made season one such a riveting spectacle will be available to film-makers this time around.

Carole Baskin – the hippy-dippy animal lover whose first husband disappeared in 1997 – has refused to participate. Her arch-nemesis, Joe Exotic – a gay, polyamorous country singer and zoo owner – is in federal prison, convicted, among other things, of conspiring to kill Baskin.

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Tiger King was the gateway drug that introduced me to the guilty pleasure of privately binge-watching trash. Sure, I'd binge-watched The Sopranos, but Joe Exotic and his chums were the furthest thing imaginable from prestige TV

The trailer’s distinctly underwhelming opening salvo – “You think you’ve seen it all ... You haven’t quite seen it all” – strongly suggests whatever new footage the film-makers Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaiklin have managed to cobble together for series two will be heavily padded out by unused footage from series one.

But before Tiger King 2 is condemned as passe and a cash grab, and in all likelihood buried in a hail of bad reviews, let us remind ourselves what a phenomenon the original series was. Tiger King debuted on March 20th, 2020, about a week after the world went into lockdown.

Within a month, 64 million households worldwide had seen it. At the time, most of us were stuck at home with a sudden abundance of free time.

The proliferation of screens and streaming services in most houses meant that fights over the remote control were a thing of the past. If a person had a tablet and a set of headphones, and they wished to squirrel themselves away in a corner to watch four straight hours of ... whatever, who was going to stop them?

Maybe I was way behind the curve in March 2020. But for me Tiger King was the gateway drug that introduced me to the guilty pleasure of privately binge-watching trash. Sure, I’d binge-watched The Sopranos on DVD with my friends at college. But Joe Exotic and his chums were the furthest thing imaginable from prestige TV.

As we’ve begun to contemplate a return towards something like normality, one question I’ve enjoyed asking people is, once they went down that Tiger King rabbit hole, where did they go next? Some gorged on murder and true-crime shows. Others got into cult shows: Heaven’s Gate, Wild Wild Country, Going Clear.

Some will speculate, unasked, about what compelled them to obsess over a certain type of show at a certain point in time. One friend told me she found herself endlessly rewatching old episodes of Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown. “C’mon, he travels around the world meeting people and eating in crowded restaurants. That’s pretty much everything we weren’t allowed to do.”

One good friend, a respected figure in his profession, and father to a young family, confided that a major part of how he'd got through lockdown had been by endlessly watching no-context compilations of ice-hockey fights

Other developments defy rational explanation. As the world lurched from crisis to crisis in 2020, I found myself taking a near-obsessive interest in the travails of an obscure loner who lives in a van in the frozen wilderness of British Columbia.

Foresty Forest is a quietly spoken Canadian YouTuber whose most intemperate utterance is an occasional "Ah, shucks" and who has probably never used the phrase "smash that 'like' button" in his life. Most of his videos concern vans and van maintenance.

To be clear, I've never been to Canada and have zero interest in owning, let alone living in, a van. If you offered me a million euro I couldn't explain what it is about these videos that offered me such solace in those dark days. But that was kind of the point. During lockdown, you didn't need to explain yourself. There was no watercooler crowd to appease. You simply discovered your streaming kink, sat back and enjoyed the guilt-free dopamine rush that was Stealth Minivan Dwelling in -41 Degree Polar Vortex.

And if you ever did feel uneasy about your strange viewing habits? All you had to do was compare notes with your friends. One good friend of mine, a respected figure in his chosen profession, and father to a young family, confided to me that a major part of how he’d got through lockdown had been by endlessly watching no-context compilations of ice-hockey fights.

Again, this person has no interest in ice hockey. He doesn't know the teams, he doesn't know the players, he doesn't know the rules. All he watches are the brawls. "I think I looked up GAA brawls online. Hard hits, something like that. Then the YouTube algorithms took over from there. There's a doc called Ice Guardians, which I'd really recommend."

Before lockdown, my friend and his wife had been regular theatregoers. When we spoke, they'd just been back to the Abbey for the first time since March 2020. How had he enjoyed the experience? "It was all right," he sighed. "But at the same time, I couldn't stop thinking, I could be at home watching ice-hockey fights right now."

That mooted "return to normality" may take a little longer than originally planned.