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Tiger King Review

Tiger King is a 2020 true crime documentary streaming miniseries about the life of Joe Exotic. It was a huge hit on Netflix during the summer of 2020 and it was really entertaining.

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“I’d shoot you before I shot my cat“

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Joe Exotic is a zookeeper, now a convicted felon. He has kept big cats in poor condition for many years until recently when he was arrested. This documentary is all about his life, his shady practices and most of all his rivalry with Carole Baskin, a woman who also holds big cats, but preaches animal rights.

This series was an enormous hit back in the summer of the 2020 pandemic year. It influenced countless memes, theories and discussions, and it’s easy to see why – it’s a genuinely fun, batshit crazy show about some truly insane people, and the fact that all of this insanity happened makes it even more surreal.

Joe Exotic is one crazy, dumb redneck guy who also happens to be gay. Among the strongest aspects of the show is the handling of his relationships. He “married” two men simultaneously, but when one of his partners died, he went to the funeral and embarrassed everybody by talking about their previous sex life. It was disgusting, and although he did show his caring side, it was still evident that he was a horrible person throughout.

His rivalry with Carole Baskin remains the core of the show and the funniest part of it for sure. They hate each other, but are actually very similar as both are these shady, immoral people dealing with big animals by keeping them in very limited spaces. It’s inhumane and just wrong.

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It’s fascinating how the show treats Carole Baskin. They basically portrayed her as the villain, which she opposed. She strongly criticized the show and won’t be back in the second season obviously. No matter what anybody thinks of her, there is no denying the fact that her first husband’s death was very odd, and that at least there is a possibility that she killed him.

Tiger King is a show that is over-the-top and silly. It lacks any sort of nuance in its execution, which is a big reason why it was so enormously popular in its heyday. Although I liked that fun, energetic, unabashedly silly approach, I still fault the show for being a middling documentary, which it most clearly is.

Documentaries should teach you about its subject matter and most of the important points surrounding that subject, but here the makers of the show just decided to put the craziest stuff first and foremost without ever commenting about the legal issues surrounding animal abuse and the relationship between these people, animal activists and the law. Some of it was there, but not enough.

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The show is not subtle at all and it truly favors its own agendas in portraying some of the personalities, the editing is all over the place and the interviews are manipulative at some capacity, but the series is fun throughout all of its seven episodes that are very easy to binge.