Streaming sanity America’s obsession with ‘Tiger King’
America’s obsession with ‘Tiger King’
Regular politicians have tried and failed to bring Americans together during Pandemic 2020. They aren’t the heroes we need right now.
America needs Joe Exotic.
Netflix’s true crime documentary miniseries, “Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness” continues to be the talk of social media two weeks after its debut on the streaming service. It follows big cat enthusiasts and their makeshift zoos, and a yearslong rivalry between two of them eventually leads to a bonkers murder-for-hire plot.
Social media right now consists of exactly two topics: Coronavirus and “Tiger King.” Joe Exotic, aka Joseph Maldonado-Passage, ran an expansive exotic animal zoo in Oklahoma that featured a massive collection of lions, tigers and other big cats. He’s quite the character - a self-described gay, gun-toting, polygamist redneck who runs his own Internet television network and records dozens of big cat-themed country songs and music videos.
The series works in a few other eccentric characters, including a retired drug kingpin, another ponytailed zookeeper with a penchant for recruiting young women for a bizarre “internship” program, and Carole Baskin, a conservationist with a clouded past who operates Big Cat Rescue and works to bring down Joe Exotic’s unethical animal care practices.
The filmmakers gained access to these big cat weirdos years before the murder-for-hire nonsense, allowing “Tiger King” to document the spiraling collapse of Joe Exotic’s sorta-empire. Joe is the star of the series, a vindictive-but-entrancing figure who can’t help but chase fame and attention even at the cost of everything he once valued. He even ran for president in 2016 (“Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” did a feature on him during that election cycle), and then for governor in Oklahoma in 2018.
“Tiger King” knows how to unspool its various salacious revelations in compelling fashion, which has led to some of the Internet’s most debated topics. For example, an entire episode focuses on Carole Baskin’s involvement in the 1997 disappearance of her then-husband, millionaire Don Lewis. The series floats several wild theories, chiefly that Baskin killed her husband then used the zoo’s meat grinder to feed his remains to the tigers.
The problem here, of course, is that the theories are based entirely on circumstantial evidence, and the people spouting them have reason to tarnish her image. Nobody really knows for sure what happened to Don Lewis, but “Tiger King” loses momentum and credibility by spending a full hour on the topic.
It’s a symptom of a prevalent narrative problem in these extended true crime miniseries. Not every story needs seven hours to be told properly. HBO’s recent miniseries, “McMillions,” about the rigged Mcdonald’s Monopoly scandal, also suffers because it stretches the story beyond its natural narrative arc. “Tiger King” already has an enigmatic star in Joe Exotic, so any extended dips down unrelated rabbit holes make the series suffer overall.
Most viewers obviously haven’t been bothered by the flabby structure of “Tiger King.” In times of pandemic, the more original content the better, I guess.
Much can be debated about whether “Tiger King” plays fair with its various subjects. But the character with the most damning depiction, Joe Exotic, still emerges as the character you can’t live without. The memes and discussions on social media tell you all you need to know: Joe Exotic is the beautiful distraction for Pandemic 2020.
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Tyler Wilson can be reached at twilson@cdapress.com. He’s been writing professionally about movies since 2000 and is the co-host of Old Millennials Remember Movies, available everywhere you get podcasts and at OldMillennialsRemember.com.
