SPOILER WARNING
This series is, quite frankly, insane and describing anything about it will give away so much. If you haven’t watched it, I recommend going into it knowing as little as possible so you can watch as the weirdness unfolds. Seriously, don’t read this until you’ve watched it. I’m going to talk about it in depth here so you have been warned...
Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem And Madness (2020)
Season One / 7 episodes
I don’t know what I was expecting from this series but I think that, even if I had known what to expect, it still wouldn't have done justice to the sheer number of bizarre things going on in here. It’s also a documentary series in which every key person involved is a fairly unpleasant human being. Let’s just tackle some of those main protagonists, then, shall we?
Joe Exotic AKA Joe Schreibvogel AKA Joe Maldonado AKA Joe Maldonado-Passage
The eponymous Tiger King of the whole series. A mullet-sporting, gun-toting, gay redneck Republican, there’s a lot going on right there before you throw tiger owning, breeding and selling into the mix.
Why’s He Awful? Many reasons. He's certainly charismatic and builds up quite a cult around himself but he has a tendency to trap young impressionable straight man into relationships with him to their clear detriment; he bleeds his parents for money to the point where he bankrupts them; paying his workers so little that they’re forced to eat expired meat (and then serving that in a restaurant); he spends much of his time making quite violent death threats against Carole Baskin and, although this one is hard to prove, likely committed arson which resulted in the death of seven alligators as well as euthanising an undisclosed number of tigers. It may be amusing to watch him run for President or make horrendous music videos (one of which features actual tiger shit) but it’s best to remember that he is not a nice man.
Bhagavan “Doc” Antle
A sort of wannabe cult leader with delusions of major intellectualism. His modus operandi is to prey on impressionable young women, make them his “wives” and then work them 16-18 hours a day for seven days a week in his own tiger park whilst paying them $100 a week. Also accused of euthanising young tigers when they stop being cute so are no longer viable for petting. Another one who comes across as a jovial type while doing appalling things to women and animals.
Carole Baskin
Leaving aside the whole “did she murder her first husband” thing (mainly because the key people espousing that view in the doc are her first husband’s ex-wife and children who clearly hate her), she spends all of her time being high and mighty about big cats yet does not seem to keep them in the greatest of conditions all the while employing an unpaid volunteer force to run the place while cleary living in a fairly opulent way.
Jeff Lowe
A clear scumbag hoodlum determined to swindle his way through life. Another man with an absolutely atrocious attitude towards women - being some sort of borderline abusive sex pest seems to be a weird theme in this series.
James Garretson
Another scuzzy lowlife who actually refers to himself as doing the noble thing at one point despite switching back and forth between all sides to save his own hide.
So given how horrendous all these people are, why did I watch it? Because the documentary makers have done a great job of mixing the horrendous in with the bizarre and amusing in such a way as to compel you to keep watching. Could it have done more to highlight the plight of the animals especially since around 10,000 tigers now live in captivity in the USA while only 4,000 exist in the wild? Yes, arguably it could have. The tale they do spin though is certainly one that it’s impossible to turn away from - maybe for all the wrong reasons but it doesn’t make it any less compelling.
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