TV REVIEW: The chaotic reign of the ‘Tiger King’ brings us together in isolation
Joe Exotic, the subject of a new documentary series on Netflix.
It’s a perpetual complaint: there’s too much great streaming content out there. So much that many conversations these days devolve into a debate circuit, where people try to convince each other to watch shows they’re watching, ad infinitum. You’d think that the global COVID-19 pandemic would only make this experience worse, what with huge chunks of the population staying home and bingeing more material than ever before.
But there are still openings for singular shows to cut through the noise and bring everyone together in a quasi-global watch party. The most recent example is Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness, a seven-episode documentary series on Netflix. The series charts the must-be-seen-to-be-believed story of Joe Exotic, the gun-toting, mullet-sporting, openly gay polygamist owner of a huge wildlife park in Oklahoma. There’s even more adjectives you can add to that description, and with every surreal dimension that the filmmakers uncover, it broadens the appeal of the show even further.
Tiger King is a cross-section of so many genres that its impact on the zeitgeist was perhaps a foregone conclusion. It has the true-crime trappings that have powered so much of Netflix’s success (the story involves murder-for-hire, drugs, illegal animal trading, and more). It has a charismatic villain as the protagonist, with other cartoonish bad guys trying to take him down. There’s an element of progressive politics in the show, given Joe Exotic’s openness about his identity in rural Oklahoma, his multiple (simultaneous) husbands, and his presidential and gubernatorial runs. And then there’s the animal rights angle and the weird cults that have sprung up inside the “big cat enthusiast” community. The experience of watching Tiger King finds you saying, “This couldn’t get any crazier” and it’s like Netflix reads your mind and amps up the drama twofold.
The series is directed by Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaiklin, and it tracks Joe over the course of the past seven years, as Goode makes repeated visits to Joe’s wildlife park. Goode conducts interviews with the snarled web of Joe’s associates, and weaves in snippets of the hours of video that Joe and his employees recorded every day. We watch Joe serenade us in cringey country music videos and deliver death threats to rivals in livestreams. He also shows off his huge collection of tigers, lions, and other exotic animals, many of which are kept in unsanitary cages and bred for profit.
Carole and Howard Baskin, of Big Cat Rescue in Florida.
The central conflict in the series is between Joe and another zoo owner named Carole Baskin, who operates a big cat rescue facility in Florida. Carole, independently wealthy thanks to the unsolved disappearance of her millionaire husband, claims to have converted to the animal rights cause. She uses her wealth and social media following to try to dismantle Joe’s park, at one point winning a $1 million copyright lawsuit that nearly bankrupts Joe. This (and many other factors) eventually leads Joe to try to hire someone to assassinate Carole. And that’s only the main thread in a story that feels like a quintessential “America in the 21st-century” saga.
As a main character, Joe has an undeniable Tommy Wiseau-type cloud around him. He’s unabashedly eccentric, egotistical, and inept. Prior to the show launching on Netflix, many people got a taste of Joe from a brief clip inserted into a Last Week Tonight segment where John Oliver lampooned some of the wild third-party candidates running for president in 2016. Standing in the middle of a lion pen with one leg in a brace and leaning on a crutch, Joe delivers a yee-haw rant that was enough to send anyone down a Wikipedia wormhole.
Joe believed he had a shot at winning the presidency because that’s how Joe saw America, as a land of infinite opportunity. Do you want to operate a run-down wildlife park with hundreds of underfed lions and tigers? You can do that in America. Do you want to marry two men at once, keeping them close with lavish gifts of guns, vehicles, cannabis and meth? You can do that in America. And so Carole Baskin’s PR campaign posed a mortal threat to Joe’s way of life, even if Carole’s own past was as checkered as Joe’s. It’s not hard to understand what drove Joe to the brink, even if you still hate him for the way he treats his animals and employees.
One of the most compelling discussions to be had about the show is the psychology of the people who keep exotic animals and exploit them for profit. It’s widely accepted that anyone (usually someone with too much money) who keeps a tiger as a pet is a little crazy. But what about Joe or his rivals, like South Carolina-based Bhagavan “Doc” Antle, who keep hundreds of big cats?
Bhagavan “Doc” Antle, another big cat specialist featured in the series.
Unlike zoos that operate as public institutions, Joe and his associates raise their cats like pets, and invite guests to get up close and pose for selfies. These operators willingly walk into pens with hungry cats that weigh as much as 900 pounds, and use their animals as props to entrap vulnerable people, often for sexual gratification. The series invites us to ponder why such behaviour is still legal, and then shows us how the big cat lobby (who would have predicted that one?) has been insidiously offering lawmakers petting time with tiger cubs on Capitol Hill in an effort to stall Carole’s restrictive Big Cat Act.
On a structural level, the series is loosely organized into themes, like the murder accusations against Carole, or the appearance of con artist/angel investor Jeff Lowe, who executes a takeover of Joe’s park. But there were times when I got lost in the timeline. Goode and Chaiklin have a habit of jumping forwards and backwards by years, and sometimes it’s hard to understand where we are in the story. As Joe’s enemies begin to rally together against him in the final two episodes, the exact sequence of events around the rivals' cooperation with the FBI gets murkier than it should be. But it doesn’t take too much away from the effectiveness of the series, and if anything, offers a slightly meta commentary on the chaos of the whole narrative.
Like many successful documentaries, the next question is how to satisfy the Tiger King-sized hole in your media diet once you’ve blasted through the series. There’s already a scripted series in the works, with Kate McKinnon attached as Carole, and people on Twitter are fan-casting the other characters (though I don’t agree with the idea of Steve Buscemi as Joe). I also got a kick out of this wrap-up of equally insane supplementary details shared by Robert Moor, a journalist who’s written and podcasted about Joe Exotic. For example: one of the officers investigating the arson that destroyed Joe’s recording studio moonlights as Joe’s limo driver! It feels like we’re only seeing the initial output of an eventual mini-industry of Joe Exotic content.
The common refrain in the age of COVID-19 is that we’re living in crazy, unprecedented times. That’s obviously true, but maybe one of the reasons Tiger King exploded in popularity is it reminds us that for one weird, underground community, backstabbing and intrigue was a fact of life. Shortages of toilet paper and hand sanitizer don’t seem so bad compared to being in the orbit of a legend like Joe “Exotic” Maldonado-Passage.