CNN
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After the hoopla Netflix unleashed with “Tiger King,” its newest docuseries oddity may contain a special four-footed creature. Like that earlier sensation, “Gunther’s Tens of millions” is basically in regards to the unusual folks featured, however its true insights expose how gullible media may be taken in by a too-good-to-be-true (or too-fun-to-fact-check) story – on this case, a German shepherd with a $400-million belief fund.
Unfold over 4 components, the story facilities on a canine residing in a complicated Florida property that when belonged to Madonna, geared up along with his personal workers of 27 common workers. As for the cash, it’s attributed to a German countess who beloved the canine and, missing surviving household, selected to go away him (and his Roman numeral-updated descendants) within the lap of luxurious.
It’s pretty clear, nevertheless, that Gunther’s caretaker, an Italian pharmaceutical inheritor named Maurizio Mian, has his paws throughout Gunther’s story (or tail), which over time included lavish real-estate purchases and surrounding the canine with a band of 5 fashions, generally known as the Burgundians, mainly portrayed as human Ken and Barbie dolls. But what nearly appears like a joke (“Keep elegant, Miami”) has a creepier side to it, reflecting Mian’s supreme of bodily perfection and curiosity in conducting weird social experiments in regards to the elusive nature of happiness.
Earlier than it’s over, the sequence – directed by Aurelien Leturgie – will reveal lots in regards to the reality behind Gunther’s thousands and thousands and the unanswered questions in regards to the when, the place and the way of his fortune.
Lengthy earlier than that, there are components of this story that don’t appear to move the odor take a look at, not that you simply’d understand it by watching the information clips sprinkled all through the docuseries – most from native TV shops – which fall hook, line and sinker for the lovable human-interest side of what they’ll invoice as “the world’s richest canine.”
The whimsical nature of the presentation signifies that the filmmakers are positioning this as a sort of docu-comedy, right down to the fidgety moments when Mian or one in every of Gunther’s “workers” balks at a query or, often, asks the filmmakers to show off the cameras.
In the end, although, there’s a darker aspect to “Gunther’s Tens of millions” that serves no less than as a lot as an indictment of those that gave Mian and others ample media publicity with out pausing to contemplate the purple flags that lastly get waved over the last two chapters.
On this style, incomes the “bizarre” label may be half the battle, and “Gunther’s Tens of millions” definitely qualifies. Nonetheless, the docuseries truly operates on varied ranges, and whereas its canine star (at present Gunther VI, by the way) seems to be a great boy, the protection surrounding him is proof of how the media can go to the canine in additional methods than one.
“Gunther’s Tens of millions” premieres February 1 on Netflix.
