The Creator of Tiger King Has a New HBO Show. It’s Even More Grotesque. (2024)

Like toilet paper shortages and disinfecting groceries, the runaway success ofTiger Kingis one of those early pandemic phenomena that feels as if it took place in a parallel universe whose portals have been forever sealed. Dropped into our lives just as those lives became abruptly smaller and scarier, Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaiklin’s Netflix docuseries was the irresistibly lurid tale of an off-the-rails character whose story was so engrossing it made going outside feel undesirable as well as inadvisable. But although it spawned numerousspinoffs and imitations, none found a protagonist as loopy or a moment as fertile. Evenits official sequel landed with a soft thud.

Chimp Crazy, the first episode of which premieres on HBO this Sunday, isn’t exactly another attempt to makeTiger Kinghappen, but you’d probably guess that it was made by the same shop, even if the only name you remember from its predecessor is Joe Exotic’s. Tonia Haddix, an exotic-animal broker with a special fondness for chimpanzees, is as powerful a curiosity magnet as the Tiger King himself, a bottomless well of narcissism, self-mythologizing, and outright delusion who often refers to chimps as her “kids.” (She also has human children, whom she freely admits she loves less.) Like Joe, she is locked in a prolonged battle with animal-rights activists over her lack of formal training and her improvised living environments, which pose a danger to her animals and the humans around them. And she’s desperate enough to get out her side of the story that she has put her trust in filmmakers who don’t have her best interests at heart.

Tonia’s story, though, is sadder and less sensational than Joe’s. Although the size of her Missouri McMansion suggests that Haddix has turned a substantial profit from selling exotic species, that appears not to be the only, or even primary, reason for her attachment. Like the other women who turn up over the series’ four episodes, she is deeply bonded with the chimps in her care and so intent on retaining and deepening that bond that she brushes away any suggestion that it might be damaging or dangerous. She insists that Tonka, the chimp she’s closest to, is a “humanzee,” half-human, half-chimp, “because we put the human side into him.” That “human side” also allowed Tonka to work in Hollywood movies, including opposite Alan Cumming in 1997’sBuddy. Cumming turns up with surprising frequency inChimp Crazy, partly to lend the series some star power and partly to testify to the profound bond he formed with his simian co-star, a connection he still feels, decades later.

Haddix isn’t alone in her belief that chimps and humans can connect as equals—or at least in her desire to think that it’s so. Sandra and Jerome Herold, of Stamford, Connecticut, raised a chimp named Travis as if he were their own child, teaching him how to use a microwave and steer a car. “Travis was like any other person in our family,” Jerome’s daughter Kerry DeBlasi recalls. “He was just the one who couldn’t talk.” In Pendleton, Oregon, Tamara Brogoitti lived side by side with a chimp named Buck for 17 years, and the husband of Pam Rosaire, who has trained performing chimps for decades, recalls walking in to find her breastfeeding their infant daughter on one side and a baby chimp on the other. “They’re my kids,” she explains, “and they’re always gonna be my kids,” although she also stresses that, no matter how trained, they should never be kept as house pets.

AlthoughChimp Crazydoesn’t dwell on or sometimes even tell us the fact, some of these women suffered horrible personal losses before taking chimps into their homes; Herold, for one, lost her only daughter in a car accident not long before acquiring Travis. In Haddix’s case, the need comes off in waves, although its source isn’t so clear. In a setup that evokes Errol Morris’Gates of Heaven(albeit without being worthy of it), she’s interviewed in an all-pink bedroom flanked by bunk beds that are empty except for two oversize teddy bears—pushing to the brink of grotesquerie a person who, with her troweled-on makeup and swollen lips, we might already be inclined to treat as a caricature.

Goode, a self-styled conservationist, was made famous enough byTiger KingthatChimp Crazyemployed a “proxy director” to film with Haddix so her suspicions would not be aroused. But that ongoing deception puts the series in delicate territory, evoking enough empathy to make her worth following at length but not enough to cause us to think twice about the ruse. In essence, we’re party to an extended undercover sting, waiting for Haddix to do something sufficiently unethical or illegal that it will feel retroactively justified. While we’re waiting, Goode highlights what’s at risk by delving into the histories of Travis and Buck. In both cases, their owners ignored the signs that their adorable baby chimps had grown into massively powerful adults, with infamous and tragic results.

What’s striking about both incidents, recounted inChimp Crazy’s middle episodes, is how quickly Sandra Herold and Tamara Brogoitti’s connections to Travis and Buck seem to evaporate when their lives and those of other humans are at stake. (Brogoitti coolly advised the police who arrived after Buck attacked her daughter to “do a head shot.”) Tonia Haddix’s off switch is nowhere in sight, but you know it’s there, waiting to be flipped, and the consequences could be dire.

Chimp Crazylacks the snack-chip urgency ofTiger King, but that’s by design. Haddix is a thorny and complicated character, although you often have to dig around the edges of the episodes for complexities they try to move right past. This is a series that isn’t meant to be wolfed down in one gulp and regretted the next morning. It’s made to be chewed on and lingered over, even if it leaves a bad taste in your mouth.