A former nurse decides to spin her love for animals into a business by becoming an "exotic animal broker", which rapidly devolves into a wild cat-and-mouse game with American authorities and animal rights group PETA in M-Net’s new docuseries, Chimp Crazy, starting on Thursday 7 August at 22:00.
Big-haired, pink-everything-bedecked Tonia Haddix spends her days caring for animals in captivity – and selling them and other exotic animals – referring to herself as “the Dolly Parton of chimps”. Through the experiences of Tonia and other "chimp moms", four-part Chimp Crazy – from the makers of whackadoodle COVID lockdown darling Tiger King – reveals the bonds between owners and their highly intelligent great ape pets, as well as the risks to the welfare of the animals themselves.
Haddix develops a particularly strong bond with a chimp named Tonka, so when the US government takes an interest in her exotic pet brokerage and intervenes to take Tonka away, a stranger-than-fiction game involving an abduction, a secret overnight stay in a Holiday Inn and a bag of pink-tinged "cremation ashes".
The 2025 Primetime Emmy-nominated series explores the roots of Haddix’s experience in "caring for" pets as she took over the Missouri Primate Foundation, originally established as a pet shop in the 1960s before becoming a "chimp rental company" for parties and film shoots. When the animals start acting out and harming people, the authorities get involved and Haddix assumes control of the organisation on the back of her connection to Tonka.
Slate’s Sam Adams writes that “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 series also explores the relationships other "chimp moms" have with their primates – and how they benefit from those relationships – but Haddix’s bizarre case is a central theme.
The Guardian’s Lucy Mangan writes that while Chimp Crazy is not as “flashy or bonkers as Tiger King”, Haddix makes for compelling viewing, thanks to her image and her “unblinking insistence on the maternal bond between a woman and her chimp babies”. She writes: “… 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 moral inadequacies, dearth of empathy, denialism of various people who appear, and the evident suffering of the chimps – whose desperate flinging of themselves round the cages is largely interpreted by their carers as evidence of joyfully high spirits – makes you long for a reckoning rather than just a rescue.”
Chimp Crazy netted over 2 million viewers within its first week of release, putting it on pace to be the most viewed HBO docuseries since 2020's McMillions.
Equal parts compelling and tragic, catch Chimp Crazy in four parts from Thursday 7 August at 22:00 on M-Net – also available on DStv Stream and DStv Catch Up.
Join the conversation on Facebook, X, Instagram, and TikTok using #MNet101.