Kingdom

This week, we’re looking at a drama that answered a question nobody at all had been asking: why isn’t there a scripted television series about mixed martial art fighting?  Running between 2014 and 2017 and potentially never showing on a UK broadcaster (that I had access to), all three series of Kingdom appeared on Netflix at some point in the recent past.  At first, I had to overcome my confusion about whether this was a further instalment of harrowing period Korean zombie fare, Kingdom (킹덤), but then it became apparent that I have now watched so many boxsets that we’ve reached the inevitable point when the names start to repeat themselves.  Nevertheless, with every episode now under my belt, I still don’t know why this show is called Kingdom.

I don’t think it’s the setting, as this is Venice Beach, a seedy-ish Los Angeles neighbourhood that is half vegan breastfeeding and half Camden Market-on-sea.  As a viewer who loves a strong sense of place, this locale gives Kingdom a raw feel to its sex appeal, with the sweaty, toned and tattooed bodies of the various fighters belonging to an array of what can only be described as white trash.  Meet the Kulina family (who again don’t seem to have anything to do with the programme’s title).  Our leading man is Alvey Kulina, owner of the successful Navy Street gym and a former champion fighter himself.  We can see he knows fighting as, when strutting through his empire, he’s got a technique cue for every grappling extra he passes.  It’s not all protein shakes and heavy sets; Frank has plenty of demons.  Three of them are the other members of his family.  Ex-wife Christina is a victim of addiction, funding her habit through her pimp’s less-than-ideal employment arrangement.  Elder son Jay is the loosest of cannons, veering on and off the rails and, no matter his alcohol consumption, he manages to maintain a body fat percentage of 0%, something the producers never allow us to forget through his constant states of undress.  Then we have Nate, a more introverted character (pop music’s Nick Jonas – saw him on Broadway once… no big deal) who lurks mostly in the shadows with problems of his own.

Both Alvey’s sons are fighters in their own right and, according to Kingdom, this involves enduring frequent cuts to make weight ahead of whichever bout they have signed up to.  As well as crash dieting, there’s a predilection to dress in plastic and sweat out as much weight as possible, pound by pound.  Joining the Kulina boys in this is fellow brawler Ryan Wheeler.  Guess what he’s got.  That’s right, demons of his own.  He spends season one transitioning out of prison, but you’ll find yourself more interested in halfway house roommate Keith, whose mental health episodes prove a laugh a minute.  Matt Lauria, of Friday Night Lights fame, plays our Ryan, but the two shows have little in common when it comes to how they portray their respective sport.  For some reason, each fight scene fails to feel like a climax.  The stakes don’t feel as high as a high school football game in Dillon, Texas (or Last Chance U).  In fact, while there are many touching and exhilarating moments, Kingdom on the whole seems to bumble along.  This happens, and then that happens, but it never feels like part of one overall narrative that is going anywhere.  Maybe this is intentional.  Maybe I’m an idiot.  The storytelling is almost purely psychological, so expect lots of lingering shots of welling-up eyes while people deal with the unbearable nature of life.  They don’t care about their black eyes but they’re sad their fathers never really showed them love.

It’s probably down to too much expectation on my part.  I’ve been spoiled recently by super-taut boxsets where each side eye and exhalation contribute to an overall juggernaut of tense storyline propulsion (I’m looking at you, Succession, and missing you every day).  I’m craving structure, but instead Kingdom has endless gratuitous footage of cocaine being snorted or breasts being fondled or arms being injected or faces getting punched or more cocaine being snorted (leading me to suspect they borrowed the prop team from Narcos).  I always wonder if the actors are really hoovering up real powder and risking septum deviation.

Meanwhile, the characters are constantly sustaining injuries.  As an athlete, you don’t want this to happen, whether in the ring or outside of work brawling with your pals.  Somehow, though, my viewing of Kingdom coincided with my own breaking of bones.  A freak Crossfit accident smashed my fifth metacarpal, leaving me with a bulky cast for the last three weeks.  I hope everyone appreciated my painstaking typing of the last three entries with a left hand alone, though I suppose the most recent one was dictated using software that made me realise what a dick I sound as I compose each sentence.  A ruinous moment for me, it allowed me to identify with the characters on a new level.  Ryan’s hurt knee stops him training, just like my busted hand meant all of the following tasks became nigh-on impossible: cracking eggs, scrambling eggs, washing up, blowing my nose, any form of chopping, in fact all cooking, using cutlery, taking out contact lenses, putting in contact lenses and many many more.

Enough about me.  The hand is back in action and we’ll crack on, then, right up until the two hundredth post of this nonsense, even though the start next month of a part-time creative writing MA could result in less time for me to produce this drivel.  That said, that same instruction might actually improve the quality of what you’re currently reading.

So, if you like violence, there’s a certain charm to Kingdom.  You’ll become part of the fighting family, enjoying something unique, ambitiously shot and fairly decently sound-tracked.  The fact that it became a bit of background viewing for me speaks more to my own distractions than the show’s quality.  Yes, I was making a lasagne while the final episode played, but I did tear myself away from the white sauce several times to join in with the emotions playing out on screen.  I’ll miss you, Kingdom, and may I never find out why you got your name.

Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem And Madness

Let’s discuss captivity.  It certainly seems like the right time for it.  The UK has been under lockdown since the start of this week, and I’ve been on enforced working from home for over a fortnight.  No gym, no haircuts, no socialising and no food in the supermarkets: welcome to my first pandemic.  But, in all this, perspective must remain a constant companion.  I have a job and a home I can do it from, so things could be much worse.  I live in a wealthy country with an infrastructure that might just about be able to cope (if we all stay in), which is more than can be said for billions of other people around the world.  All I must undergo is some temporary hardship.  I must confine myself to my brand-new new build.  I forego physical contact with all friends and family.  But thanks to the internet, I have unlimited entertainment and education at my fingertips.  I can and shall occupy myself while counting those blessings.  And it is indeed this same blessed internet (and its bedfellow, Netflix) that has brought something incredibly entertaining to the UK’s captive audience in recent weeks: Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness.

It's occupied our number one spot for some time now, so, like a rampant infection, it was only natural that I too should fall to its appeal.  In fact, those seven episodes formed something of an uncharacteristically irresistible binge for me.  I devoured them all in a matter of days.  I suppose I do have more spare time as I can’t go outside (beyond my single government-approved exercise window per day – thanks gammon-in-charge Bozza), but I just had to know what was going to happen next and what possible conclusion it could all draw to.  The colon in its title is a pointless adornment; they had me at Tiger King.  Big felines have long filled me with terror, despite being a flag-waving cat person from a cat family, with only indifference for dogs and mostly antipathy for their owners (with many exceptions).  As a child, I had a recurring nightmare of being trapped in Chessington World Of Adventures, desperate to drag my family away from the lion enclosure before they emitted deadly roars – yes, I was more scared of their barks than their bites.  A recent trip to South Africa saw me taken to a lion park by cousins I hadn’t seen for 27 years.  Rather than try and front a brave-man act as the pride chased our vehicle to the exit, I totally lost my cool and even refused to open my door (or take off my seatbelt) once we were all clear of the safety barrier.  I love wildlife, but will from now on only encounter the dangerous ones via a screen on Our Planet or Seven Worlds, One Planet.

However, I can’t resist the constant tension of some stupid human sitting next to a deadly tiger or lion without any protection beyond their own sense of ego.  It makes for a fascinating Louis Theroux documentary (2011’s America’s Most Dangerous Pets) which features scenes that still haunt me, mostly because Theroux was so visibly uncomfortable around dangerous animals.  And rightly so.  Here we are, years later, dealing with the same character at the heart of the same subject: Joe Exotic (Schreibvogel-Maldonado-Passage).  If the ever-present threat of a mauling isn’t compelling enough, our Joe has all the qualities that render any viewer physically incapable of wrestling their eyes from the screen.  Redneck and proud of it, Exotic boasts a peroxided mullet, cowboy tassels and a multitude of other adornments that scream attention-grabbing.  Some piercings dangle sadly, his middle-aged skin’s elasticity the victim of smoking, sunshine and drugs, yet we can only imagine the state of his Prince Albert as he takes us through his collection of weighty padlocks for attaching to it on an impromptu tour of his very untidy bedroom.  Part The Office’s David Brent (for the music videos alone), part S-Town’s John B. McLemore (only with a manifestly lower IQ), Exotic is the gun-totin’ ringmaster of an Oklahoma petting zoo.  Only these aren’t bunnies and ponies, these are lions and tigers (and their curious dual-heritage offspring, ligers).

Guests are protected by nothing more than Exotic’s own self-belief – and it’s powerful stuff.  It convinces him to run for state governorship and for president.  It guides his acoustic tastes – the only music he likes to listen to is his own.  It propels him to celebrate a three-man marriage in a very conservative state.  It renders him impervious to animal rights groups that advise that maybe you shouldn’t breed tiger cubs simply for sale as pets, or for stroking by punters until they’re too old to be cute and are euthanised, that you shouldn’t feed them out-of-date supermarket meat and roadkill, that you shouldn’t confine them to cages.  Thus arises the key narrative of the documentary series: Exotic’s primal rivalry with fellow big pussy fan and arch-nemesis, that lovely flower garland-wearing, slow-cycling Carole Baskin down in Florida (“Hey all you cool cats and kittens”).  She mandates that these animals shouldn’t be petted, or bred for petting, or kept in captivity at all.  Running a sanctuary for rescue animals, she inspires her social followers to join her in pressuring Exotic and his pals to right their wrongs.

She might sound angelic, but one of the most delicious parts of Tiger King is not knowing who’s worse.  Rumours circle Baskins like lions stalking prey.  What happened to her very wealthy first husband?  How and why did he disappear?  Why didn’t his family get anything?  Are the rumour true that she fed his body to her tigers?  Most evil of all, she runs her park using unpaid volunteers only (Exotic pays his in petty cash and trailer-park living) and masks her origins in captive cat breeding, though she is very open about her incredibly ironic cat allergies.  In her tit-for-tat conflict with Exotic, you sit there paralysed about who to root for.  The answer is neither.

Instead, you can dismiss them both on the quality that unites them: their complete lack of taste.  From leopard-print leggings (well, leopard-print everything) to neck tattoos, big cat people are drawn to anything tacky.  It evidences their pursuit of status: you can swing no bigger dick than having the king of the jungle as a house pet.  Most sinister of these egos is Bhagavan “Doc” Antle.  Proving correct the theory you should never trust a man who has a soul patch and a pony tail, polygamist Antle is not (yet, at least) directly embroiled in the feud-propelled crimes at the heart of Tiger King, merely commenting as an onlooking character witness.  Yet his passion for attention drives some of the best humour in this otherwise serious matter, directing the documentary team to feature him only in the most flattering of set-ups.  His ego is more fragile than the tigers’ natural habitats.

I’ll finish up by considering the most compelling moment in the whole thing.  I was going to focus on the footage of Exotic getting dragged around a cage by the foot after some cologne on his shoe prompts an aggressive reaction from one of his big cats.  In a split second, the underlying tension bursts to the surface and we are seconds from death.  Or there’s the moment his campaign manager witnesses a colleague die, with his reaction captured on CCTV.  This will chill you.  But the winning moment is in fact the footage of “businessman” James Garretson thinking he looks cool while doing water sports.  For some reason, there is nothing more compelling than a fat man with a bad haircut on a jetski.

Let’s be honest, Tiger King is fairly exploitative, delivering up white trash on a stick, but I couldn’t get enough of it.  Some more intriguing details are cruelly glanced over: what exactly happened to Saff’s arm, why does Exotic have a knee support, why is John Finlay topless for most of his interviews, what happened in Jeff Lowes’ Las Vegas petting van etc?  Instead, way is made for endless footage of big cats receiving questionable treatment, enough that you eventually feel almost disappointed that there aren’t more scenes of humans being attacked.  Not because you wish ill on any member of the public, but because these big cat people are clearly the most dangerous predators in the animal world.  Maybe it’s time for them to experience some of this captivity first hand.