(Part of an occasional series.)

The Black Stallion is bookend-ed with two of Hollywood’s favorite tropes: the shipwreck and the horse race.

What happens in between, however, is anything but cliched. The 1979 film, produced by Francis Ford Coppola, is nothing short of magic, a profound adaptation of a children’s story that became arguably one of the first children’s art films in modern Hollywood.

Several fine movies have followed in that narrow niche, including Wall-E, The Iron Giant and Where the Wild Things Are.

But those films had the luxury of computer wizardry. What you see in The Black Stallion is a novice director teaming with a novice cinematographer who filmed everything they stumbled across on the Mediterranean beaches of Sardinia, Italy.

And what a trek! They capture un-digitized rainbows, un-pixelated sunsets and unabashed  animal tricks, including swimming horses and striking cobras. The first half of the film, which includes 28 minutes without a word of dialogue, is simply art projected on a screen.

Based on Walter Farley’s bestselling book series of the 1940’s, The Black Stallion movie  contains some of the most impressive nature scenes committed to film. That they reside in a feature film makes Stallion a literal visual fairy tale.

Consider two scenes in particular. In one, Alec (played by 12-year-old Kelly Reno, a Colorado-born cattle ranchers’ son who’d never acted a day in his life) feeds”The Black” a leaf of seaweed to earn its trust — and eventual love. In a long tracking shot, Reno beckons the Arabian horse so close to his face the horse could have easily bitten Reno’s nose off.

In another, Alec awakens one day early in his odyssey to a cobra inches from his face. Both remain near motionless, cobra hooded and hissing, until The Black arrives to stomp out the threat. Reno is among real animals, and was separated from the cobra simply by a pane of glass. It is one of the most intense scenes ever in a children’s film, yet Stallion would still be freighted with a dreaded G-rating.

Despite Coppola’s name and sway, The Black Stallion would not see the same storybook ending as The Black. The film sat for two years as studio heads bickered over a marketing strategy — or whether to market at all.

Despite some very adult themes, Stallion was saddled (sorry) with a G-rating that was tantamount to a death sentence at the time. Before computers made it relevant, the G-rated landscape was relegated to goofy live-action (The Apple Dumpling Gang, Escape to Witch Mountain) or traditional animation and puppetry (Charlie Brown, The Muppets). Dumplings may be simple, but they’re marketable.

And consider Stallion‘s competition for thoughtful adults in 1979, which saw the premieres of Apocalypse Now, Alien and Kramer vs. Kramer, among others.

Not that the film lagged commercially: It cost about $3 million to make, and took in almost $38 million at the box office (enough to warrant an awful sequel). But its artistry — from scenery to soundtrack — would not be fully recognized until years later. It was recently featured on the Turner Classic Movies network.

Stallion is the the perfect launch for Deja Viewed in particular and pandemic viewing in general. It’s part silent, all poetic, and is in no rush to get anywhere. Kind of like us.

And, regardless of how trying the pandemic is on our lives, The Black Stallion puts quarantine living in context. At least we’re not waking up with cobras.

And The Oscar Should Go To…

The Academy Award for best documentary, feature and short, often goes to the non-fiction movie that not only takes a revealing snapshot of the nation or world, but also changes the way we look at it.

Think Bowling for Columbine, the 2002 movie by Michael Moore and Michael Donovan that examined America’s gun culture, inspired by the Columbine High School massacre. Or An Inconvenient Truth, Davis Guggenheim’s 2006  film about global warming.

They’re usually films that have sizable budgets and notable stars. While less spectacular affairs than commercial feature films, documentary features often boast the traditional trappings of Hollywood: Moore is one of the movie industry’s most famous reporters; Truth had Al Gore as its narrator.

This year, however, there is no star, issue or publicity campaign that is going to rival the most important documentary of 2020 — or, perhaps, the decade. Or millennium.

That movie is the the 8 1/2- minute video of the murder of George Floyd, filmed by 17-year-old Darnella Frazier in Minneapolis.

After all, what movie, documentary or otherwise, has sent a cultural ripple like Frazier’s cellphone footage? Consider the impact it’s had on America since the May 25 death:

• The city council of Minneapolis has vowed to disband the city’s police department.
• The mayors of New York and Los Angeles—America’s two biggest cities by population—announced plans to cut funding for their police forces.
• Cities nationwide are set to ban choke holds by police, make all local police shootings subject to review by independent agencies, or reduce police presence at schools. Congress promises similar federal reaction.
• State lawmakers in Mississippi started drafting a resolution to change the state flag, which contains the Confederate flag in its upper-left corner.
• The U.S. Marine Corps banned displays of the Confederate flag on its installations.
• Monuments honoring Confederate leaders have been or will be removed in Asheville, North Carolina; Birmingham, Alabama; Tuscaloosa, Alabama; Mobile, Alabama; Alexandria, Virginia; and Louisville, Kentucky. (The governor of Virginia also announced plans to remove a large Confederate statue in the capital city of Richmond, but the plan now faces legal challenges.)
• The city of Philadelphia removed a statue of Frank Rizzo, a former mayor and police commissioner who in the 1970s implored residents to “vote white”; the city of Antwerp, Belgium, removed a statue of King Leopold II, a monarch responsible for countless atrocities in Congo more than a century ago.
• The Senate’s Armed Services Committee voted to include a measure in a defense-authorization bill requiring that military bases named for Confederate leaders be renamed.
• Corporate leaders, facing criticism for racial insensitivity,  have resigned from positions atop  CrossFit, the Poetry Foundation, the city of Temecula, California, the co-working company The Wing, the publication Refinery29, and The Philadelphia Inquirer.
• Alexis Ohanian, a co-founder of Reddit, gave up his seat on the company’s board of directors and requested that his replacement be black; the company honored his request, appointing Michael Seibel, the CEO of the start-up-investment firm Y Combinator.
• NASCAR banned displays of the Confederate flag at its races. U.S. Soccer, the organization overseeing the country’s national soccer teams, repealed a rule that banned players from kneeling during the national anthem.
• LeBron James and several other athletes and entertainers are forming an advocacy group that will encourage African Americans to vote in the 2020 presidential election, as well as work to protect their voting rights.
• Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the National Football League, apologized for ignoring the complaints of African American players for years, and said he recognizes their right to protest peacefully, as Colin Kaepernick had by kneeling while the national anthem was played before games.
• IBM ended research into and sales of its facial-recognition software, citing concerns about racial profiling when the software is used in the context of law enforcement; Amazon suspended the use of its facial-recognition systems by police departments for a year, which it said “might give Congress enough time to put in place appropriate rules” regulating the technology’s use; Microsoft pledged not to sell facial-recognition software to police departments until such rules are established.
• Walmart said it will stop keeping beauty products marketed to African American customers in locked glass cases; the cosmetics retailer Sephora said it will start dedicating 15 percent of its inventory to products made by black-owned businesses.
• The Paramount Network canceled the TV show Cops, which presented a flattened moral universe in which the cops (many of them white) were good and the people they confronted (many of them black) were bad.
• HBO removed Gone With the Wind from its streaming service and said it plans to eventually present the movie “with a discussion of its historical context” and a denunciation of its portrayals of race.

You can argue how many of these measures were directly due to that riveting short film. And you can argue the merits of the steps taken. But, regardless of where you sit on the political spectrum, there can be no debating this: That movie has forced America — and the world — to examine how it sees race.

Perhaps more than  than 12 Years a Slave, the 2014 film that captured Oscar’s grand prize, Best Picture.

The problem is, the viral movie does not qualify under the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ (AMPAS) guidelines for eligibility for an Oscar. Those rules, which were changed this year due to the COVID pandemic,  include that the footage run in “qualifying” theaters if and when movie houses reopen at large.  Short of that, the new academy rules stipulate that qualifying movies “be made available on the secure Academy Screening Room member site within 60 days of the film’s streaming/VOD release or broadcast.”

A New Oscar Category

I have no idea whether there’s an effort underway to meet AMPAS’ guidelines to make the footage eligible for an award, but it shouldn’t have to. The Oscars should make a new category to recognize that kind of movie.

After all, viral videos have become part of our moviegoing experience, even if we’re just going to our computers. Just as Netflix and other streaming services have managed to get on the Oscar radar (think Roma, The Irishman, etc.), viral videos have managed to get onto our radar. Think everything from the Rodney King beating to Donald Trump’s “pussy grab” tape. They have altered the very landscape of political discourse.

There should be a formal acknowledgment of that impact from someone in the movie industry beyond a celebrity wearing a Black Lives Matter t-shirt. Hollywood directors can be finicky about who should qualify for a gold statuette (Steven Spielberg and Christopher Nolan, for instance, vociferously challenge Oscars that do not entourage  the in-theater experience, and they make strong arguments. The theatrical experience is unmatched in a theater.

But in the YouTube/Twitter/Facebook era, we cannot ignore the impact of seeing something on a screen no bigger than a cellular phone.

Oscar Would Become Relevant Again

If the Floyd video underscores anything, it’s that the time to act is now. And it just so happens Oscar is looking for a way to become once again relevant.

In recent years, the Academy Awards have developed a reputation for being too white, too male, and too out of touch with everyday Americans. And it’s cost the award show dearly in ratings.

Viewership for the 2020 Oscars plunged to a new low in February, with an audience of 23.6 million tuning in to watch the broadcast on ABC, according to Nielsen. That’s a 20 percent drop from last year, and roughly three million fewer than the number of people who tuned in for the 2018 ceremony, the previous low.

Imagine the viewership for the first Oscar telecast to honor a viral video. It would attract young viewers. Minority viewers. Viewers who don’t watch movies. The very people the Academy cannot coax now. The same could probably be said for any film critics circle that makes room for viral videos. If, for instance, the Golden Globes were the first with such an award, which show would you watch?

The Public Service Pulitzer Of Movies

An Oscar for the video with the largest cultural impact of the year could also serve as a sort of Pulitzer Prize for the everyday citizen. The granddaddy Pulitzer is the Public Service Pulitzer, but it does not recognize viral videos either. For once, an Oscar could mean more than an impressive trophy on a Hollywood shelf.

The ripple effect of such an award would be seismic. The public is already infatuated with Hollywood. Think of how many people would begin documenting what actually occurs in their corners of the world. They would illuminate everything from hunger to homelessness in ways that even the most creative filmmakers cannot imagine.

This runs a risk, of course. People may be tempted to stage movies or embellish the circumstances they’re portraying. But America’s Funniest Home Videos has run a similar risk for years, and managed to weed out the forgeries. The Academy could stipulate veracity rules into its guidelines just as it has vets content for other types of films.

Frazier Deserves Recognition

Even on a filmmaking level, Darnella Frazier deserves recognition. Like a war correspondent, Frazier faced immense challenges and dangers, yet displayed profound bravery in making her movie. She confronted the very real possibility of being arrested, Maced, or forcibly removed  from the scene.

But she stood her ground, in broad daylight, and openly recorded the injustice she saw unfolding before her. How many filmmakers have demonstrated that much courage, calmness and on-the-spot thinking as Frazier. The list is surely short.

And she’s received so much grief for her actions. Some critics have excoriated her online for seeking recognition or reward for the video. Just look at her tweet following the airing of her movie:

This is a teenager we’re talking about. One who spoke up, stood her ground — and caught more than a little hell for it. Michael Moore even said on his podcast that her movie was the documentary of the year. The young woman deserves a trophy. Many of them, in fact.

Someday, a Hollywood documentary filmmaker is going to make a movie about the video and the aftermath that followed. Perhaps they’re doing so right now. Netflix may have already secured film rights to it.

Someday, it may be eligible to officially compete for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. I can see the title (which I offer to Darnella, who has more than earned the right of first refusal): I Can’t Breathe.

But instead of acknowledging the sea change that’s occurring in the wake after her film, why not be a part of it?

It’s hard to say specifically which day the movies died. It’s not like music, which could say Feb. 3, 1959 — the day Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and “The Big Bopper” J. P. Richardson died in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa. 

We don’t have a dramatic departure for the movie hero, no ride into the sunset, no plane ascending a Casablanca night sky. But make no mistake: There was a sad farewell.

Maybe it was Oct. 27, 2018, the day Roma was released on Netflix and considered a legitimate contender for Best Picture. Or maybe it was Sept. 27, 2019, when The Irishman was released (again, on Netflix) and considered the early Oscar favorite. Perhaps April 28 of this year, when the Academy permitted streaming films to compete for the industry’s granddaddy prize.

Regardless, COVID-19 has guaranteed that films, at least as we know them, are dead.

Not dead and gone. People, particularly young people, still like movies. There will be a market for them when lockdowns lift, vaccines bubble and our herd feels comfortable becoming a community again.

But when it does, will theater chains still be there? Already, the theaters business — battling the Internet, gaming and streaming hysteria — were operating on razor-thin margins. When COVID hit, Tinseltown was already wheezing.

And now? The National Association of Theater Owners reported that 89% of the nation’s movie screens went black with the virus. The association requested — and will receive, if Trump is to be believed — billions of dollars to keep theaters running and its 150,000 employees paid.

But will that do? AMC Theaters announced it will raise $500 million in debt just to stay afloat during the pandemic. Cinemark, the third-largest movie theater chain in the US, has laid off half of its corporate staff and furloughed 17,500 hourly workers due to coronavirus pandemic restrictions.

And how exactly will social distancing work when you’re gathering a few hundred people to sit for a couple hours in the dark? Limiting seating and rows is one strategy. But we’ve got about 40,000 theaters in the country, all of which depend on shoulder-to-shoulder seating.

It doesn’t help that Hollywood has lived off an embarrassment of riches for decades. Last year’s biggest movie, Avengers: Endgame, had a budget of $400 million. Who would drop that amount on a movie now?

In 2018, the average movie ticket was $9.11, the first time movies eclipsed $9 a pop. Theater owners rightly say that $9 is far cheaper than a concert or a sporting event. Of course, that $9 has to be multiplied by the size of your family, and does not include the cost of food, drink, parking and the aggravation of sitting next to assholes.

And, as is its tendency, Hollywood’s reality was blissfully unwavering in its ways. Studio chiefs note that ticket revenues eclipsed $11 billion last year, and film remains one of the country’s most potent exports (internationally, Hollywood has never done better).

But once you’ve adjusted for inflation, about 240 million Americans see a movie every year, a stat that has remained relatively flat for two decades. And steady business is a failed formula when worker salaries balloon to eight figures, their product, nine.

The theater association is fond of saying that it’s faced threats before — television, cable, video, streaming — and emerged victorious every time.

But cinema’s decline will be marked not by a decapitation, but a death from a thousand cuts. True, we did not stop going to movies when TV became, essentially, a superior medium. Same when Netflix arrived; salaries and budgets never stopped ballooning.

But, little by little over the years, rust began to discolor Hollywood’s gleaming 1968 Ford Mustang 390 GT Fastback from Bullitt.

Studios may have collectively already surrendered to the virus. In March, Universal Pictures announced that its theatrical films would be made available at home on opening day, a first for the industry (normally films had to three months in theaters before heading to home viewing). It wasn’t long after competing studios followed suit, and now the industry  charged around $30-$50 per new release (a good bargain if several people are watching together).

I’m certain that much calculation went on into “at home” tickets. Surely, studio heads factored in how many Americans watch a movie together, with families, in pairs, etc. The statistics are there.

The conditions, however, never have been. Until now. Regardless of the accuracy of studios’ predicted prices, this is a shot in the dark, plain and simple. When have we ever considered a pandemic in our economic forecasts? What happens, for instance, if studios discover the break-even price is $129 a film? Will audiences accept a doubling?

In my 30 years of reporting (!), I never had to go on strike for my newspaper, though I worked for several papers that did strike — and my father was a lifelong member of the Newspaper Guild, a division of the Teamsters. What I learned was that, regardless of the might of either side in a strike, nobody wins, because circulation inevitably falls off permanently.

The lesson: Don’t push people to see how much they can do without. They’ll surprise you.

The virus may ultimately be a blessing to the industry. Studios leery of bankrolling quarter-billion gambles may put their money on cheaper experimenters, as in the 70’s. Television has already gone through a remarkable transition, morphing into cinematic entertainment like The Wire and Breaking Bad. The pandemic need not be an end to one of our tribe’s favorite rituals.

Perhaps instead movies will go the route of Broadway: Something to attend when the event is extraordinary. Or baseball games, where you get the full immersive experience.

And there’s already an upside: The 300-some odd drive-in theaters across the country are reporting a pronounced uptick in business. Some theaters are selling out Friday and Saturday night shows, and others are reporting a spike in business of more than 300%

And doesn’t a drive-in on a cool summer evening sound dreamy?

The change is coming. We simply have to accept it, channel our reboot resources, and realize that many of our impressive cardboard forts are no match for rain.

Admit it. You haven’t been doing the reading you should during The Great Thinning. Come oooooonnnn: You know the most serious consideration you’ve given to a book lately is whether it’s worth more as text or toilet paper.

Don’t feel guilty. We’ve been weaning off books since TV was invented in 1927. And the pandemic may mark the period historians note as the time we made Netflix the new American library system. Only $9.99 a month for a card, and all you need is a particular antenna for the boob tube.

As our parents and grandparents discovered in the glory days of Dewey Decimals, libraries are really just a magnifying glass for the casual stroller. The browser can spend hours poring over volumes of stories, sample a few pages or snapshots, deep-dive into an artist, binge on a collection of works.

So, too, is the streaming world. Particularly now, a collection of videos is akin to inheriting a storage bin. Occasionally, you’ll find that dusty Picasso, that discarded diamond, that priceless baseball card.

Or, in the streamers’ case, that TV show you’ve been meaning to watch and never have (see The Wire, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, yaddy).

In my case, it was Community, the NBC sitcom that has developed a streaming cult following since moving to Netflix (as have their other Thursday prime-time shows, The Office, 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation). While I watched some or all of those shows, I never gave the sitcom about a community college a glance. Dan Harmon, the creator of the series, based the show on his time at Glendale Community College, where he took a Spanish class and bonded with the study group — just as in Community.

My mistake for not giving it a chance. Despite uneven writing and a collapse that made the final season unwatchable, Community feels a bit like discovering Infinite Jest or A Confederacy of Dunces. Both were masterworks whose young authors committed suicide. While Harmon never offed himself, he nearly committed career suicide when alcoholism and arguments on-set prompted his ouster by the fourth season. While Harmon ultimately returned, the show never fully recovered.

But what flashes of genius the show demonstrated in its prime. Like all entrants in the NBC Thursday comedy lineup, Community boasted a multi-cultural cast, largely unknown actors, and a double-dose of sardonic wit. NBC didn’t utilize sarcasm; it bathed in it.

Community, though, offered something additional, a component television rarely broaches: Earnestness. The exemplars were Donald Glover and Danni Pudi, who play students Troy Barnes and Abed Nadir, respectively.

Troy and Abed were the best TV duo since Starsky & Hutch. Theirs was a treehouse friendship, complete with secret handshakes, blanket forts and impossible cardboard carpentry. While both ostensibly pursued heterosexual relationships, Community made clear their first love was toward each other. I’d be hard-pressed to name another pair of male TV friends who are so outward in their love. Perhaps Bart & Milhouse?

Troy and Abed’s chemistry became apparent at the end of only the second episode, when they broke into a beatbox rap centered around their Spanish homework, as seen below. It’s brilliant wordplay, and the bit would become a touchstone throughout the series, underscoring Community‘s innate sweetness.

Not that Community didn’t have an edge. Chevy Chase, who was the biggest name on the cast, played a misogynistic, racist homophobe. And there hasn’t been as likable a scoundrel on screen since Royal Tennenbaum turned his family inside out in Wes Anderson’s sublime comedy film in 2001. It’s Chase’s best work in decades (though that may not be saying much, given his career arc of late).

Chase plays Pierce Hawthorne, an Archie Bunker with millions. The only thing he has more of on his hands than time is cash and boredom. He’s at his best — and Troy and Abed  their most innocent — in the near-perfect episode The Aerodynamics of Gender. Note the soft-gauze lens framing the trampoline, which takes religious symbolism here. The episode loosely assembles around a bouncy yard the students discover, but ends up being a skewering take on race, gender baiting and the limits of friendship, all while parodying Mean Girls and The Terminator.

The last two references are important, because Community was nothing if not meta. I hate that term, so popular among critics nowadays. But it would be hard to describe the show as anything but aware of itself, sometimes preciously. Community was so aware of the tropes and traps of the sitcom it couldn’t help but announce when it was employing either. If anything, the show was sometimes so keen on its devices the viewer couldn’t get past them to just enjoy the story.

Which, ultimately, marked the show’s demise. On-set patience grew thin. Chase and Harmon detested each other. Stars ascended. Regulars drifted to new projects.

At least we got to say goodbye. Unlike so many shows, the viewer can see  precisely where Community detached from the rails. In the fifth year, the brilliant episodes Cooperative Polygraphy and Geothermal Escapism, which aired back-to-back, officially bid adieu to Chase and Glover, respectively. And with them went the series’ bottled lightning.

It all might have been a bittersweet farewell ride, but Netflix has become something of a TV defibrillator. The Office and Parks and Recreation, for instance, have seen a ratings spike, especially under lockdown. Breaking Bad was such a streaming mainstay Netflix gave it its own movie, El Camino.

And last week, Harmon told reporters that “conversations are happening that people would want to be happening” about a Community movie, and that he’s “very, very excited about the coming months.”

In Community‘s case, there’s no reason to think that excitement is not sincere.

If Hollywood were still around, stuntmen would be the talk of it.

In March, Brad Pitt won an Oscar playing an aging stunt double in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. His real-life stunt double, David Leitch, went from the landing mat to the director’s chair to direct Deadpool 2 and Atomic Blonde. Keanu Reeve’s stunt double, Chad Stahelski, went on to direct the monster John Wick trilogy.

Add now Sam Hargrave, Chris Evans’ stuntman for the Captain America franchise, enters the fray with Extraction, Netflix’s latest original.

If there’s a common theme to the tone of stunt-double-films, it’s this. No stunt is too daring, no storyline too outlandish, including Extraction.

Consider its protagonist. Tyler Rake sounds like a Mad-Libs action hero name. When you add to the mix that this character actually, literally kills someone with a rake, it starts to veer into parody territory. That’s why it’s somewhat surprising that the film built around that wonderfully silly name, Extraction, is entirely sincere and also pretty fun.

Extraction  is a straightforward shoot-em-up about a jaded mercenary, Mr. Rake, played by Chris Hemsworth, who’s hired to save the 14-year-old son of a drug lord from another drug lord in Bangladesh. It doesn’t do anything to push the genre forward, but it’s better than you might think, existing comfortably somewhere on the action flick spectrum between Tony Scott and Peter Berg.

Much of that rests on Hemsworth’s (very large) shoulders. The Australian actor hasn’t had the easiest job finding solid roles outside of Thor. He’s always good even when the movie isn’t, and obviously has some tricks up his sleeves that belie his action-hero physique. But many of his leading man roles that don’t have anything to do with the God of Thunder have come and gone without much fanfare. So it makes a certain amount of sense that Extraction is Marvel-adjacent. It’s written by Joe Russo (one half of the Russo brothers who have directed a handful of Marvel movies, including Avengers: Endgame), directed by Marvel stunt coordinator  Hargrave in his debut and based on a graphic novel (Ciudad).

The graphic novel origins help explain “Tyler Rake,” but that name is about the extent of the comic book elements in the actual film. And, to be fair, Extraction even knows it’s ridiculous, hence the rake and the fact that the 14-year-old asset Ovi (Rudhraksh Jaiswal) walks up to the line of making fun of it at one point.

The film begins at the end, showing Tyler Rake (it just feels more right to say his full name) bloodied, battered and near-death on a bridge, having blurry flashbacks to some feet in the sand before cutting to two days earlier in Mumbai. (Don’t hate Extraction for its cliches, they’re just part of the fun).

It won’t shock you to learn that Tyler Rake is a bit of a loner who keeps his living quarters in shambles, but you get the sense that he always knows where the bottle of Oxy is. A woman (Golshifteh Farahani) comes to him with the job to save the kid, whose father is in prison, and Tyler Rake sets off to Dhaka to track him down. There, the criminal underworld plays out in broad daylight, with crime bosses, child soldiers, corrupt police and an overall vibe of instability populating the streets. Tyler Rake finds the kid easily enough, but then things start to get more complicated when he discovers that he’s not the only one looking for Ovi (and ready to kill to get him).

But don’t despair, Tyler Rake has about two hours of non-stop fight in him before he gets to that bridge and the blurry flashbacks. He’ll fight, and win, against anyone who comes in his way — even a group of kids. He doesn’t kill any of them, though. He just kind of injures and disables the “Goonies from hell.”

The word distraction has started to lose all meaning this deep into our home lockdowns, but there is a certain comfort in curling up with a big, silly action pic like Extraction. It reminds you of something you might have spent money on to see in an ice-cold theater on a hot summer day.

Here, in the stark luminescence of a worldwide pandemic, we can be honest with each other, human to human. And here’s the truth: Cat people are weird.

You know it. I know it. And Netflix sure as hell knows it: Over winter, the streamer had the documentary of the season with Don’t F*** with Cats, a terrific true-crime tale. Now, they have the series of spring with Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness.

The series kicks off with the crazy-cat-lady premise, and then which proceeds to prove it — and then some — over seven jaw-dropping episodes. Netflix has made a lot of noise with unscripted programming, but it’s going to roar with this beyond-bizarre docu-series distraction, which demonstrates that outlandish people who love filming themselves are a formula for TV that’s grrrr-reat.

It’s hard to know, frankly, where to begin with all the strange twists and turns, but directors Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaiklin rightly assume that it’s easiest to work backward from the (almost) end: Joseph Maldonado-Passage, an eccentric keeper of tigers, lions and other big cats in Oklahoma who goes by the name “Joe Exotic,” allegedly having orchestrated a murder-for-hire plot against Carole Baskin, a woman who runs a facility called Big Cat Rescue, who had lobbied to shut down operations like his.After that, though, there’s a whole lot to chew on. Big cats, it turns out, are a kind of aphrodisiac, inspiring what can only be described as cultish devotion — including Joe’s marriage to not one but two men; another big-cat owner, Bhagavan “Doc” Antle, who is basically a polygamist; and Jeff Lowe, who comes into Joe’s orbit later and brags about using exotic pets as a come-on to find partners for threesomes.But wait, there’s more: The colorful characters that Joe attracts to work for him (including one who loses a limb to a tiger attack); Joe’s desire to create his own media kingdom, enlisting a former Inside Edition correspondent, Rick Kirkham, to oversee his TV efforts; and finally, Joe’s forays into politics, running for president before mounting a libertarian bid for governor of Oklahoma, despite being a little unclear on what a libertarian actually is.Finally, there’s Baskin, who would seemingly be the voice of reason in all this, objecting, as she does, to people housing and trading in dangerous cats. Still, she finances those efforts largely through the fortune she inherited from her late husband, who disappeared under the kind of mysterious circumstances that even a Dateline NBC producer might consider too good to be true.Because the big-cat owners are showmen (beyond the zoo, Joe fancies himself a country-and-western singer), there’s a whole lot of vamping for the cameras. They also tend to document their actions extensively, which makes the occasional use of reenactments here feel especially gratuitous.Still, even by the standards of reality TV — a genre populated by exhibitionists and those seeking their 15 minutes of fame — Tiger King is so awash in hard-to-believe oddballs that lean into their image it genuinely feels like a Coen brothers movie come to life, the kind of thing any studio would return to the writer saying the screenplay was too over the top.During the final chapter, one of Joe’s employees says there’s “a lot of drama in the zoo world.” That’s about the only thing that’s understated in Tiger King, which — even amid the current glut of true crime — is the kind of binge-worthy game that’s almost impossible to resist.

Netflix is a data-driven dance floor, an algorithmic treehouse . The company  monitors the viewing habits of its 158 million subscribers so closely that it not only knows what you watch, but when you watch it, how much of it you watch, the trends that are most likely to hook you —  even the thumbnail images most likely to convince you to watch a new series. Its breadth is both impressing and daunting.

Don’t F**k With Cats is a case in point: Netflix has analyzed the data and deduced that what the world needs more than anything  is a true crime documentary series about obsessive internet users and cats.

What a genius move. What a home run. What a no-fail combination of everything that everyone likes, bundled up together in perhaps the most high-profile film about cats ever made (besides Lion King).

The story of Don’t F**k With Cats doesn’t really matter; you’d watch it even if you thought – as I initially did – that it was going to simply be an America’s Funniest Home Videos compilation of cats clawing people to shreds during attempted baths.

However, the masterstroke here is that the narrative is simply unbelievable. And – this should be said upfront – it’s incredibly upsetting. This aspect can’t really be overstated. There are moments that are viscerally harrowing. The story begins with a video uploaded to YouTube that graphically depicts the torture and murder of two small kittens. You don’t see the video – or any subsequent similar videos – in the documentary, but there are plenty of Grizzly Man-style reactions nevertheless. One is by a senior police officer who ends up reduced to tears. It is a violently distressing display of human depravity. If you’re even slightly queasy about this sort of thing, I’d seriously recommend giving it a pass.

Nevertheless, the story is incredible. An anonymous user uploads the kitten video, and it appalls a group of Facebook users so strongly that they use every tool at their disposal to track him down. They parse the video frame by frame for something – anything – that will give them a clue to the killer’s whereabouts. Plug sockets and cigarette packets are scrutinized. A specific blanket is tracked down through eBay. The expertise of an incredibly niche online vacuum cleaner forum is consulted. Metadata is cross-referenced with Google Maps. This is the hive mind at its most clever.There are elements of Don’t F**k With Cats that play out like the film Catfish, if Catfish had any real stakes. But Cats also takes time to explore the darker impulses of the amateur detectives. The fate of one falsely identified suspect is genuinely horrible to witness, and key members of the investigation repeatedly ask themselves whether they were solving a crime or simply egging on a violent criminal. This is the hive mind at its worst. That the film spans the spectrum of the hive, usually by examining hive members, is a canny gesture. That is fair and balanced reporting, my colleagues.

One key member – a woman named Deanna Thompson – is the de facto narrator of the series. As you’d expect from someone as Very Online as her, she’s incisive and witty, and quick to pull the threads together in a dynamic way.

But that’s arguably the biggest problem with the series. This is a show with a jokey title and a self-aware narrator that splashes around in some of the worst human behavior imaginable. As soon as the horror of the cat videos subsides, we’re off on a wild goose chase of reverse image searches, Google Street View sweeps and fake identity databases. And then we learn who the murderer is, and that his murders are about to escalate beyond cats. We meet the family of his victim, and the lurching duality of the series threatens to become almost untenable.

Still, it is beautifully presented and the final episode includes a flourish of bow-tying not seen since the climax of The Usual Suspects. But it still makes me deeply uneasy that a man who committed an awful crime purely to gain notoriety has now been dragged out of obscurity to be celebrated in a buzzy Netflix show. At least Don’t F**K With Cats’ filmmakers are aware of this. Hives are just too riveting — even malformed one — to look away.