TV Talk: HBO’s ‘Chimp Crazy’: A better, more entertaining ‘Tiger King’

Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.

If you liked Netfllix’s “Tiger King,” odds are you’ll love HBO’s “Chimp Crazy” (10 p.m. Sundays, Aug. 18-Sept. 8) from the same director, Eric Goode.

If, like me, you thought “Tiger King” was ultimately a dull slog — too many episodes, not enough story — you’re more likely to enjoy the tightly edited, four-episode “Chimp Crazy,” a series at times hilarious and heartbreaking, entertaining and tragic.

Both series highlight people involved in the exotic animal trade, but “Chimp Crazy” focuses mostly on women who seek to mother monkeys, which can also be extremely dangerous.

“Chimp Crazy” includes true-crime capers and a legal case surrounding its lead character, chimp-loving Tonia Haddix. If there’s a scripted version of “Chimp Crazy,” surely Jennifer Coolidge (“The White Lotus”) will play Haddix, the self-described “Dolly Parton of chimps.”

Due to his notoriety from “Tiger King,” Goode hires a “proxy director,” Dwayne Cunningham, who has bona fides in the exotic animal trade, including a criminal record. This duplicity raises ethical questions that the show elides. “Chimp Crazy” does sort of address a different but connected question of documentarian ethics near the end of the series.

Haddix, an exotic animal broker, welcomes the camera crew into her monkey-centric world and seems eager to tell her story, even when it takes a turn into court after PETA sues over chimps’ living conditions at the Missouri Primate Foundation, a family-owned breeding compound.

Goode juxtaposes the super-serious, headsmart People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals lawyers with Haddix’s emotional attachment and goal to keep the animals in her life.

“PETA has no empathy for the people who own these animals,” a PETA representative says as the film cuts to Haddix feeding a chimp Reese’s peanut butter-flavored whipped cream from a can. She also treats the monkeys to McDonald’s Happy Meals.

“I love these chimps more than anything in the world,” Haddix tells a TV news crew. “More than my kids, more than anything.”

That kind of statement and Haddix’s seeming obsession with the animals, coupled with her look, certainly gives this show the “crazy” vibe the series title suggests.

But as “Chimp Crazy” goes on and Haddix’s story becomes more ridiculous — no spoilers here, avoid a July 2022 Rolling Stone article on the case — Goode also paints Haddix as more human. Viewers meet her husband and her son and learn more about her backstory, including her time as a foster parent.

Goode also reminds viewers of the danger Haddix and people like her put themselves and others in when they live with non-domesticated animals. Goode retells the story of a Connecticut woman whose face was ripped off by a chimp and an Oregon woman whose daughter was attacked by a chimp.

“Chimp Crazy” paints a more complex, nuanced portrait of chimp owners than “Tiger King” did of folks who collect Big Cats. “Chimp Crazy” also proves more entertaining with surprising twists and outlandish characters who are hard to dislike even as they make terrible, self-destructive life choices.