Tiger King operates on two pop-cultural levels. The micro: we gaze astonished and delighted at a glamour shot of three meth-addicted married men printed on a microfleece blanket; and the macro, in which the show emerges as a perfect synthesis of several different mass media genres stretching back over the last century.

I, too, use parental controls for their devices and stare with some concern at the shouting YouTubers making slime and playing Minecraft. But it has helped me, in the throes of my middle-class guilt, to know that moral panics about children and technology, or children and popular culture, are a particularly common feature of mass media as it relates to modernity.

The year is 1982. US President Ronald Reagan is ankle-deep in his first term. Across the pond, Margaret Thatcher will soon be elected Prime Minister of the UK. Everyone’s shaking hands with free market capitalism, neoliberal ideals, and a hostile brand of shark-eyed individualism that will endure for decades to come. Jim Henson is having none of it.