‘Tiger King’ Review

Did you know that there are more captive tigers in America than there are in the wild? I didn’t. In fact, I knew very little about the domesticated tiger business. According to this documentary series, this business is nuts and has some of the most colorful characters working in it.

Tiger King has become a national phenomenon. While it has died down, the series came out towards the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic and people were hooked. It gave people something perfectly weird to binge while stuck inside. Audiences really dug this up and it exploded all over the internet, sprouting hundreds of memes and jokes. 

Fans really got invested in all of the craziness of what they were watching. There is already a scripted TV show being made about this with Nicolas Cage set to play Joe Exotic. But does it really deserve the hype that it got? Let’s talk about it.

Tiger King is a documentary that really focuses on Joe Exotic, an extremely colorful, quirky, and loud-mouthed big cat zoo owner who claims to be the Tiger King. The show really focuses on his downfall and how his enterprise collapsed and he ended up in prison for attempted murder for hire. 

Along the way, we are introduced to an equally wacky group of people such as Bhagavan “Doc” Antle, a competing zoo owner, Jeff Lowe, and Carole Baskin, a big cat “rescuer” who has a heated rivalry with Joe Exotic. 

Throughout the show, we are introduced to a series of new developments that are shocking and make you question how you had never heard about any of this before.

Firstly, is the show as crazy as people have claimed it to be? Yeah, it’s pretty bonkers. Each episode kept introducing new information that kept getting weirder and weirder.

From Joe’s marriages to his music to his rivalry with Carole Baskin, it just kept getting more bizarre. There is really no one to root for because just as someone appears to be normal, something bizarre is revealed to make you rethink how you feel about that person. It really is the people that carry this show.

What’s interesting is that even though we are told by many people that Joe Exotic has done terrible things, it seems that people find him very endearing. It is similar to how the public feels about Tommy Wiseau, director of the infamous The Room. He is just such a strange, alien of a man that it is almost impossible to not be intrigued by him. 

He has a certain charm and charisma from his clearly lip-synched music to his presidential campaign. There is just something intriguing about the guy even though he does terrible things. He provides so much content for memes because he is just a unique phenomenon of a person.

Carole Baskin, the only person on this show who claims to be trying to help the animals, is really made to be the villain. Even though we don’t see her actually do anything bad, we go off theories that the show is telling us. The disappearance of her first husband is a big part of the show and it stretches the audience’s negative opinion about her. 

Many of Joe Exotic’s jokes about her are often played for laughs but lead to a dangerous path. She is a bit of a whack job but I do feel that she is portrayed a bit unfairly by this show, although I do not know the full truth.

The other thing about this show is that it prioritizes the weird people involved in this ordeal rather than the animals. It mentions some of the cruelty shown to the animals committed by Joe Exotic, but it doesn’t go into detail about it nor propose any solutions for it. It’s ok that the show didn’t want to make the show about the abuse of tigers, but is clearly focused on the more entertaining and weird side of this ideal. 

I also think that towards the end of the show, they could have cut out some details. It did get a bit slow and the craziness did start to die down once it became more of a legal drama. Watching Joe strut around his zoo and complain about Carole Baskin is definitely the heart of this show.

The pacing is pretty good as it keeps revealing new information in order to keep you invested. Each episode ends with another crazy reveal in order to get you to keep watching. One of the most interesting episodes was actually the bonus episode where a lot of the people from the show are being interviewed by Joel McHale. 

This revealed some secrets that were not seen on the show and provided some more perspective about the people who worked for Joe or were involved with Joe somehow. It also exposes many of the evil deeds committed by Mr. Exotic that caused many of his associates to want to distance themselves from him as much as possible. 

Overall, Tiger King is a very entertaining look at the unknown business of big cats and the separate world in which this business takes place. While I don’t necessarily think it is necessarily a work of art, it is definitely as crazy as people say it is. 

There is a reason why Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin have become internet phenomenons because this whole situation is just so unbelievable. I definitely recommend watching it and getting caught up in all the insanity. 

Final score: 4/5