Why is “Tiger King” on Netflix the biggest hit so far for the vast audience created by the coronavirus Iockdown? For starters, it contains every weird and therefore addicting trope that tabloid TV ever imagined.

It also seems to connect in unexpected ways with the side of America that ever since childhood has wanted to run away and join the circus.

Or at least, that’s what I thought until I was talked into binge-watching a few episodes by Grady Page, my millennial and highly opinionated (where does he get that?) son.

Why, I asked skeptically, should I spend hours of my life watching a show about a gay, gun-toting, mullet-wearing, half-showman, half-conman private zoo owner who wages a war against an obnoxiously zealous female animal rights advocate who is trying to put him out of business?

Just watch, said my son. “It’s really about Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.”

Ah, isn’t everything?

But politics aside, the show already had caught my interest, mostly as a punchline among late-night comedians. After it premiered on Netflix on March 20, “Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness” quickly became the most popular new show on TV, according to Rotten Tomatoes, which gave it a 97% critic’s rating and a 96% audience score — and No. 1 on Netflix’s own Top 10 shows list.

The show, billed as a true-crime series, has more colorfully oddball characters than an Elmore Leonard or Carl Hiaasen novel. The star of its narrative is Joe Exotic, formerly Joseph Allen Maldonado-Passage, and several other names who, before the world went sideways, claimed to own more tigers than anyone else in North America.

Spoiler alert, although it doesn’t spoil much: Joe Exotic ends up in federal prison serving a 22-year sentence for violating the Endangered Species Act and plotting to carry out a murder-for-hire plot against his arch nemesis in this story line, rival big cat owner and animal welfare activist Carole Baskin.

I later learned that my offspring was not the first observer to perceive a Trump-Clinton connection. Among other critics, feminist author-commentator Jill Filipovic blasted the series on CNN’s opinion site as a “victim-blaming” example of “how misogyny in America is alive and well — or how we elected Donald Trump as president.”

Indeed, Baskin, who heads the respected nonprofit Big Cat Rescue, has posted her side of the story on her organization’s website for those who want to take the time to hear about it. But the “Tiger King” series says little about her achievements compared with complaints about her from Joe Exotic and his fellow “Big Cat” men.

When I showed that to my Bernie Sanders-supporting son, he saw Baskin as guilty, too, at least of excessive “virtue signaling,” a charge that I find to be at least superior to having no virtue at all.

He invited me to hash it out with him on “Generation Fringe,” the podcast that he started, which you can hear here (SoundCloud “Generation Fringe, Episode Four: “American Wildlife”), to explore our generational differences without disrupting family dinners.

More than one debate continues. Netflix has announced an additional episode to update the narrative. Sheriff Chad Chronister of Hillsborough County, Florida, has reopened his investigation into the disappearance of Baskin’s husband, Don Lewis, who ran a big cat sanctuary in the Tampa area before he disappeared 23 years ago.

And Investigation Discovery network has announced its own follow-up, “Investigating the World of Joe Exotic.”

More to come, I’m sure. Comparisons to the Clinton-Trump contest may seem to fall apart as the tiger tales unfold. Yet I still hear a familiar conflict as Baskin, once the would-be victim in a murder plot, now pushes back against rumors and suspicions raised by her rivals.

As I said after Trump’s election, we can all benefit in these polarized times from taking a peek at how the world looks to those who happen to be on the other political side. The same holds true in the freak show world of reality TV where what you are in reality can mean less than what you represent in other people’s imaginations.

Clarence Page, a member of the Tribune Editorial Board, blogs at www.chicagotribune.com/pagespage.