The “Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, And Madness,” now streaming on Netflix is a spectacular,   mind-blowing, even Bonkers journey into an unexplored corner of Weird America –  the wild, lawless and unbelievable animal cult, and kingdom world. Tigers and snakes do strange things to people.

I don’t think my jaw has ever dropped so many times in a single hour of screen watching. The seven-hour documentary has become a runaway hit in the time of the coronavirus, riding the top of the service’s top ten list for much of this week.

The insane story is apparently keeping lots of people sane and off of cable news.

Almost every character in the film is larger than life, even the young tiger keeper who had an arm chewed off and came back to work five days later.

There are more tigers living in captivity in American now than exist in all of their natural habitats in the world. The wild cat world is a universe unto itself in our country, drawing millions of tourists and millions of dollars largely out of sight of media and government regulation.

This tiger and wild animal compounds are often linked together by trading, gossip, the illegal purchasing of endangered species, polygamist owners, bitter feuds and rivalries, horrid living conditions for animals and people,  and serious questions about the way they these animals are treated.

Leave the New York Carriage horses alone, PETA, get out there into the heartland and raise some Hell.

Structurally, the documentary is a mess, but the series does a great job of portraying the culture that sustains and supports this mysterious addiction to wild and dangerous animals.

It’s hard to imagine any world being crazier than the one boiling outside right now, but Tiger King sails right over the coronavirus in craziness,  it is a very rich feast, bringing us a mad, corrupt, greedy, abusive, sexist and exploitive cast of characters.

The most shocking thing to me, and something I had to keep reminded myself about, was that it’s a true story.

The Tiger King centers on the life of a gun-toting, mullet-wearing, meth-addicted gay polygamist who calls himself Joe Exotic (his real name is Joseph Maldonado-Passage), who is the owner and operator of the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park in Oklahoma.

Joe Exotic is in jail right now, serving a long sentence for plotting to kill  Carole Baskin, who runs the Big Cat Rescue near Tampa, Florida. She is the target of unproven rumors that she murdered her first husband and fed him to one of her tigers.

She has a huge following on social media – millions and millions – and makes a fortune charging admission to her Cat Rescue Park, which is ostensibly devoted to the preservation of wildlife (as is the claim of all the very controversial tiger animal parks.) Apparently in our country, it doesn’t matter how you treat a tiger, as long as you do it in the name of animal conservation.

Baskin essentially is doing the same thing the Tiger King was doing, except she brilliantly couches her park as a “rescue” park, not a kind of baby-tiger petting zoo. And she gets her 100 or so volunteers to work for free by awarding them different color T-shirts for their time of service.

It is almost impossible to tell the good guys from the bad guys in this true-crime series, maybe because there are no good guys, just a string of wild characters, each one more bizarre than the other.

There is also Travis Maldonado, a drug dealer turned tiger lover, scary Cult Leader Doc Antle, who attracts young and rootless women to his park (his exploitation of them is heartbreaking), changes their names, dresses them in tiger pants, urges them to get implants,  and makes them work 16 and 17 hours a day.

Antle makes no bones about having multiplies wives in a “harem,” and giving them all homes in his animal park. He and his latest wife sleep with baby tigers and leopards.

In addition, there’s rival cat collector Tim Stark, a car-stealing snitch named James Garretson, a bald hitman and a mysterious Las Vegas money man.

It is disturbing to watch the long lines of tourists, each happy to pay a lot of money to be photographed cuddling a tiger or a tiger cub. Nobody seems to know what happens to these cute tigers when they get older but ex-employees all talk of gunshots ringing out in the night when they get older. These parks all sell animals to one another.

Adult tigers are very expensive to feed.

In one of the parks, the park workers swarm over trucks carrying discarded or unsold meat from Wal-Mart, they pick through the packages for their dinner, which takes place in filthy trailers with giant rats. I can only imagine what the tigers eat.

There is much too little attention paid to exactly how the tigers are trained, and what this kind of captivity does to their psyches.

This documentary is a knockout, a narrative mess that blows off most of the very deep animal rights issues that practically scream for attention when it comes to the ownership of wild animals like tigers in the homes of stunningly dubious entrepreneurs.

It’s hard to blame the producers for that, the characters in the documentary are irresistible.

The tigers end up in small cages, in the backs of hot vans, and are sold, slaughtered or who disappear when they are no longer cute or cost too much money to feed.

Once in a while, one escapes and kills dogs and cats, and sometimes, even unsuspecting people.

The series is a must-see for anyone, but especially for animal lovers.   It is not bloody or scary or graphic.

I promise you that you will forget all about the coronavirus for these seven hours. Maria and I will be streaming it all weekend, we stayed in bed nearly until noon to watch the first two hours, we were speechless.

This story could easily have come out of the mind of Florida novelist Carl of Hiassen, although it is almost too wild to be believed.

We are a stranger country that most of us even know. And this is a lot more riveting than CNN or Fox News.