Netflix’s Tiger King introduces audiences to a handful of large-cat owners in America who need to be seen to be believed. (Joe Exotic—the mulleted, gun-toting, cowboy at the show’s center is a combination of Joe Dirt and Arrested Development’s Gob, dabbling in magic shows and homemade music videos when he is not tending to his animals.) Though the seven-part docuseries, from Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaiklin, tracks the colorful operators of private zoos in the not-so-distant past—Joe Exotic was sentenced to 22 years in prison just this January for his murder-for-hire plot and other wildlife violations—there are already updates on the over-the-top personalities, most of whom had not seen the series before it premiered Friday.

In an interview with Vanity Fair, Chaiklin suggested that seeing Tiger King could be a wake-up call for some of the characters featured. “There will be some people who are really happy with the series,” said Chaiklin. “There will be others who are not so happy. I think it will be a moment of reckoning for who they are and what their behavior actually is.”

Rick Kirkham

Rick Kirkham. Courtesy of Netflix.

The TV producer who acts as an all-knowing Big Lebowski–type narrator in Tiger King left the U.S. after the Joe Exotic saga took another tragic twist—when the structure containing hours of footage he planned to use for a reality series burnt to the ground in a mysterious fire on Exotic’s Oklahoma property. Speaking to Vanity Fair from Norway last week, Kirkham explained: “I moved here to marry my girlfriend about two and a half years ago and, quite honestly, to get the hell away from that entire part of my life.”

Kirkham said that he only agreed to revisit this traumatic chapter when Tiger King’s producers agreed to meet him in Oslo. “It wasn’t a subject I wanted to go back into,” said Kirkham, adding that filming—and recapping his time with Exotic—was not remotely healing. “The only therapeutic part of this entire scenario was hearing that Joe had been sentenced to more than 20 years in prison.”

“You have to understand, this is one of the cruelest human beings I have ever encountered,” Kirkham said of Joe. “He is so cruel and so evil…like something out of The Omen.”

Kirkham still regrets having put his career on hold to embed himself in Joe’s private zoo—but at the time, he said, he saw the potential to make a lucrative reality-TV show. “I ended up selling my soul to the devil as a journalist, just because I knew I had something that was so big and so outrageous that I was going to retire on it basically,” said Kirkham. “Within three months, I should’ve probably walked out of that place and just said, ‘Take your losses and leave.’ But I had all my money and all of my equipment and everything else in my life wrapped up into what I knew was going to be a very big reality show.”