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‘Joe Exotic’ UCP Limited Series Starring Kate McKinnon As Carole Baskin Becomes Hot Commodity With Success Of Netflix’s ‘Tiger King’

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Back in November, UCP announced Joe Exotic, a limited series starring and executive produced by Kate McKinnon. Four and a half months later, interest in the project, based on Joe Exotic, the second season of Wondery’s Over My Dead Body podcast, is skyrocketing because of the massive popularity of the Netflix docuseries Tiger King, about the real-life characters depicted in the Joe Exotic limited series.

In Joe Exotic, when big cat enthusiast Carole Baskin (McKinnon) learns that fellow exotic animal lover, Joe “Exotic” Schreibvogel (aka Joseph Maldonado-Passage) is breeding and using his big cats for profit, she sets out to shut down his venture, inciting a quickly escalating rivalry. But Carole has a checkered past of her own, and when the claws come out, Joe will stop at nothing to expose her hypocrisy. The results prove deadly.

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The limited series, which McKinnon executive produces with Wondery’s Hernan Lopez and Marshall Lewy, is still in internal development at UCP and has not been set up at a network or a streaming platform. When it is taken out, there will be no lack of potential suitors, with Netflix possibly among those interested in the limited series because of its kinship with Tiger King.

Baskin, an owner of a big cats sanctuary, is featured prominently in Netflix’s Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness, which revolves around a handful of eccentric characters, led by the flamboyant Joe Exotic, a tiger breeder and big cats zoo owner who was convicted for trying to hire a hitman to kill Baskin.

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