I mean, I wanted all these people to be in jail right from episode 1.
Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness
Likes: There is a definite “Can’t look away from a car crash” quality to the people and events in this series. What an insane story to document for over five years.
Dislikes: A “Save the Tigers” message or similarly interesting premise is vastly overshadowed by a “Laugh at the freaks” theme instead.
Bottom Line: Unfocused but insane, Tiger King can either make you stop and stare, mouth agape, or shut off Netflix in disgust.
2.5 out of 5. ◆◆⬖◇◇
by Jacob Schermerhorn
Sometimes luck is half the battle. Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness was certainly a beneficiary of shelter in place/quarantine/social distancing. Although Netflix keeps its numbers obscured, we do know that Tiger King averaged over 19 million viewers over its first ten days. That’s a lot of eyeballs for the weirdest documentary series Netflix ever produced.
In the personal opinion of this set of eyeballs, even after a bonus episode designed to wrap up certain storylines, (hosted by Joel McHale for some reason?) I am still left asking “So what?” after 8ish hours of viewing.
Blackfish, another documentary highlighting cruelty to animals, managed to make me sympathize with the former SeaWorld employees who appeared to have true regret. In Tiger King, I felt that virtually all the major characters deserved to go to jail with Joe Exotic. Unlike Blackfish, in Tiger King, my sympathy was exclusively reserved for the tigers, not the humans.
But maybe that’s the point?
The story of Tiger King is a twisting tale about the underground world of exotic animal traders and the eccentric characters that inhabit it. To give a short summary:
Joe Exotic (real name Joseph Allen Maldonado-Passage, né Schreibvogel), featured on the posters and trailers, is the bleached blonde, gay-polygamist-paranoid-flamboyant-magician-musician-animal keeping main character of the tale. Carole Baskin, a cat lady meme personified, is Exotic’s biggest enemy and an animal rights activist who wants to put Exotic out of business. Through escalation and brinkmanship, Exotic eventually hires a hitman to kill Baskin which lands him in prison.
Oh yes, and Exotic also runs for president and governor of Oklahoma.
Other characters include Bhagavan Antle, a boisterous Penn Jillette type who runs a sex personality cult at his zoo, Jeff Lowe, a Las Vegas thug who ends up taking control of Exotic’s zoo, Joseph Dial, campaign manager for Exotic’s presidential and gubernatorial runs, Saff Saffery, a former animal wrangler for Exotic who lost his hand at the zoo, Rick Kirkham, producer for Exotic’s failed reality TV show, and many other hanger-ons, employees, volunteers, lawmen (Amanda Green, personal MVP, is the exact person I imagine as a federal prosecutor) and spouses that would take another fifteen paragraphs to summarize.
Which highlights the main issue that I had with the unbalanced, albeit, enthralling documentary. The focus on the absurd characters left me asking at the end of every episode, “So what?”. At the end of the day, the series is more concerned with illustrating the crazy path that led to Exotic’s incarceration, not the overarching systemic elements that allowed it to happen in the first place.
(I do understand the difficulties for the creators of Tiger King though. With the tangled web of a story they had to unravel, I can see how telling it there would be missed opportunities.)
However, some fixes seem obvious to me. Throughout the entire series, I kept expecting (and desiring) an expert. There is no science given for how to properly house and feed a tiger, so I had nothing to compare to Exotic’s habit of collecting roadkill or dumpster diving discarded meat from Walmart. I assume that’s bad for tigers, but I still don’t know for certain, and the documentary never clarifies.
In fact, Tiger King doesn’t seem to be interested in clarifying how serious the tiger issue is or the laws that allow private citizens to keep big cats. What I remember instead about the legal issues is Carole Baskin dressing up in leopard print while in the halls of Congress. I remember the colorful personalities, not the true issues or stakes.
I am still struggling to find the value in Tiger King beyond a bunch of weirdos in a niche, bizarre field of work. A clear focus or thesis isn’t required in all documentaries, but Tiger King could have benefited from one.
Real Human Bing Movie Thoughts 