For anyone who hasn’t yet gotten around to Netflix’s latest buzzworthy true-crime docuseries, let me briefly explain what’s going to happen once you dive into The Kings of Tupelo: A Southern Crime Saga from directors Chapman Way and Maclain Way. At some point, you’ll find yourself so gobsmacked that you’re convinced the story can’t get any weirder — and then it gets weirder. At which point, just as you’re convinced that’s now as far as the weirdness goes, nope, it hits you with yet another blast of WTF.
The Kings of Tupelo is built around something all-too-common in the small-town South, a feud that explodes into war. It sounds straightforward enough, but for the fact that this story’s grab bag of insanity also includes an internet conspiracy, black market body parts, an Elvis impersonator, and an assassination attempt on the President. Essentially, this is the story of how a loudmouth Elvis impersonator and janitor ended up accused of trying to poison the man who lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Oh, and I forgot to mention the best part — it’s from the studio behind Tiger King. Say no more, right?
While watching the trailer below, I think I laughed out loud the hardest at the point when a former Mississippi politician and funeral home owner quietly opines about two antagonists: “These two have a Napoleonic syndrome: Little men, trying to be big.” And then, cut to one of those men, who thunders to the camera with his country accent: “I said, ‘Quit stalking me, bitch!’”
The whole thing pretty much unfolds like that. I mean, when an elephant getting shot in a drive-by is only like fourth or fifth down on the weirdness scale in a true-crime story like The Kings of Tupelo, what else is there to say but welcome to the true Stranger Things?
Currently #5 in the US, Netflix explains about the show that: “In Tupelo, Mississippi, the memory of Elvis Presley looms large. The legendary singer was born there in 1935, and the town still plays host to a fervent fandom, replete with copious impersonators. Tupelo native Paul Kevin Curtis was raised to revere Elvis, and he eventually partnered with his brother Jack for Double Trouble, a first-of-its-kind double Elvis revue. But when Curtis’ day job as a janitor led him to a shocking discovery in a morgue, he went down an internet rabbit hole into a world of startling conspiracy.”