I was on a Zoom happy hour videoconference call with some colleagues last week (because this is how we live now) and we were sharing what we were watching to while away our time in quarantine. Someone went, “Tiger King, it’s amazing!” Well, therein began my journey into the trippiest seven hours of television I have witnessed on Netflix. This is the first Netflix show to get a Covid-19 boost as we are all stuck at home, but it’s certainly worth it.
Tiger King is ostensibly about Joe Exotic (his real name is Joseph Schreibvogel, but let’s forgo the formalities, shall we?), a flamboyant man who runs the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park in Oklahoma where he owns more than two hundred tigers and other big cats and exotic animals. At the very beginning, we know Joe is currently in jail, for ordering a hit on some woman; and then we cut to five years earlier when the documentary crew first got interested in this weird insular world of exotic animal collectors and conservationists in the United States that eventually led them to this incredible story.
Frankly, you need to just watch this series to figure out what it’s about, because I binged my way through it in two days and am still not quite sure what I watched. Every single character is an utter lunatic, and while they are incredibly personable and interesting, they are deeply bizarre examples of humanity. There’s Carole Baskin, the woman who runs a big cat sanctuary and wants to abolish private zoos like the one Joe Exotic runs because the animals are ill-treated. But as we dive into her story, it becomes unclear if this woman is the heroine she claims to be - she still charges people to come see the cats in her sanctuary, and it feels like a zoo itself. And then there’s the small matter of her millionaire husband who mysteriously disappeared, with the rumor being that she murdered him and fed him to a tiger. Um WHAT?
There’s Bhagawan “Doc” Antle who runs an animal preserve in South Carolina and seems like an affable oddball until you discover he is essentially running a cult with the nubile interns he hires to help take care of all his lions ands tigers. There’s a ton of polyamory going on, with everyone seeming to have multiple husbands and wives and behaving like a ton of hippies except ones who also very firmly believe in their second amendment rights and tote a lot of guns around. There are Joe Exotic’s husbands, who all seem a bit drug-addled, there’s his many music videos (yeah I can’t even get into that right now), subsequently the tale of how he ran for President (maybe that’s who could have us protected us from the coronavirus), and then the escalating tension and money troubles and ongoing feud with Carole and PETA leading to the FBI getting involved once it all got a bit murderous.
Tiger King is fantastical and farcical: if it were a scripted series, you would dismiss it immediately for being way too over-the-top, but nope, this is all real life. These people live crazy lives, make crazy decisions, and quite frankly are living the American dream. Apparently there are more privately-owned tigers in the United States than are roaming free in the wild in the entire world today. We’re #1 baby, and as this documentary points out, yet again, this is something we really shouldn’t be #1 in. If you really need a selfie with a tiger cub to make yourself look good on Tinder, chances are, you weren’t that much of a catch to begin with. So delve into the wild world of exotic animals with Tiger King: this is the horror story David Attenborough never told you about.
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