The true tiger kings just landed an Apple TV+ limited series.
The legendary German-American tiger-handling duo Siegfried & Roy, comprised of Siegfried Fischbacher and Roy Horn, will be the subjects of an upcoming Apple TV+ biographical series. In the vein of “Pam & Tommy” and “Welcome to Chippendales,” the yet-untitled half-hour series will be told from various perspectives and document the story of Siegfried and Roy’s star-making act in Las Vegas.
“Only Murders in the Building” co-creator John Hoffman is writing and executive producing the series, with Ron Howard and Brian Grazer of Imagine Television also serving as executive producers. The Apple TV+ series is based on the eight-part podcast “Wild Things: Siegfried & Roy,” released in January 2022.
No casting has been announced as of print.
Siegfried and Roy began as a cruise ship and nightclub magic act before receiving a Las Vegas residency. The duo famously worked with white tigers at the Mirage Hotel and Casino from 1990 until 2003, when Horn was bit in the throat by one of the tigers and suffered a stroke. Both Fischbacher and Horn stepped away from public life following the attack. Horn died in 2020, and Fischbacher died in 2021.
Along with Grazer and Howard, Tony Hernandez, Lilly Burns, and Kristen Zolner will executive produce for Imagine Television, plus James Seidman. Will Manati, executive producer of “Wild Things: Siegfried & Roy,” will also serve as executive producer alongside Emmy-winning filmmaker Steven Leckart for At Will Media. Apple Studios will serve as the studio on the project.
“Siegfried and Roy have always loomed large for me. And no one has ever properly examined their story — or the attack — in depth,” filmmaker Leckart told The Guardian earlier this year. “They were hyperbole manifested. Everything about them was bigger, was louder, was dialed up to 11, which is a deliberate Spinal Tap reference. But what kept them going for so many years was their incredible skill and the way they progressed their show.”
While series creator Hoffman’s “Only Murders in the Building” is a meta-commentary on the world of podcasting, Hoffman’s upcoming Siegfried and Roy series falls in the trend of Apple adapting podcasts to the small screen. Last year’s “The Shrink Next Door” was based on the Wondery true crime podcast and starred Will Ferrell as an unstable patient taken advantage of by his scheming shrink, played by Paul Rudd. The Apple series “WeCrashed” was based on the Wondery podcast about the rise and fall of WeWork from “Business Wars” host David Brown.
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