Chimp Crazy

“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.

A startling portrait of need, delusion, and the cruelty it begets, all of it perpetrated in the name of compassion and adoration.

Goode’s methods are legitimately gripping, even if they stray into all kinds of gray areas. I found that the docuseries stayed with me for days after I watched, and it has affected how I think about all our interactions with animals, both domesticated and wild.

Chimp Crazy lacks the snack-chip urgency of Tiger King, but that’s by design. Haddix is a thorny and complicated character, although you often have to dig around the edges of the episodes for complexities they try to move right past. This is a series that isn’t meant to be wolfed down in one gulp and regretted the next morning. It’s made to be chewed on and lingered over, even if it leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

The story gets weirder as it goes along. It also gets more involving and coherent, having taken a few digressive side trips before swinging into forward motion.

“Crazy” is both compassionate and manipulative, and the filmmakers themselves deceive some of their subjects and become major players in Haddix and Tonka’s story. .... There’s an endless “OMG” feeling to everything here, the kind of show that puts the outrage in outrageousness.

“Chimp Crazy” is less fascinating for the story’s outcome than its insight into the types of people who are obsessed with chimps regardless of the dangers they pose.

The series is disturbing, both in terms of animal welfare and human behavior — Goode’s as well as Haddix’s. I found it difficult to watch at times, yet it pulls you through to the end, as the plot progresses from strange to stranger. It is, of course, designed to do just that.

Chimp Crazy is at once better and worse than Tiger King. I was only occasionally gripped while watching it, but I was left feeling only slightly dirty and not wholly unclean after the experience.

There is a bleakness to the twisted relationships on show, the unmet needs of both humans and animals that suffuses the whole in a way that the crassness of Joe Exotic and – you know – all the hitman-hiring stuff allowed Tiger King to avoid.

The end result felt deeply depressing, leaving the impression that Haddix and the rest of the chimpanzee fanciers featured need help, not exposure in a four-hour documentary series that shamelessly takes the moral high ground despite being built on shaky foundations.