Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem And Madness’ On Netflix, A Crazy Docuseries About Big Cat Owner Joe Exotic

While the true crime docuseries that have been debuting over the last few years have been interesting, we’re more fascinated with the ones that are under the “batshit” category, like McMillions or Don’t F**k With Cats, where the subject matter is out of left field and the story takes more twists and turns than a roller coaster. Just in time for social distancing comes Tiger King on Netflix, the battiest of the batshit docuseries. Read on for more…

TIGER KING: MURDER, MAYHEM AND MADNESS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A guy in a cowboy hat says “Where do you want to start?” The director says, “At the beginning.” The man lights a cigarette and says, “It’s a crazy beginning.”

The Gist: Tiger King, a docuseries that can only be described as “batshit,” starts with various interviewees talking about how the people who own exotic animals, especially big cats, are “crazy.” Then we get introduced to Joe Exotic, a man with bangs, a mullet and a Fu-Manchu mustache, who ran his own exotic animal park in Oklahoma; but the first place we hear from him is in a county jail, where he awaits trial for hiring someone to kill a woman named Carole Baskin.

We then flash back to five years ago. Filmmaker Eric Goode had been filming people who bred and raised venomous snakes in Florida, when a buyer came along who happened to have a snow leopard in a cage in the back of a hot van. “Oh, he’s acclimated to the climate,” the guy who just bought the leopard told Goode. That’s when Goode became fascinated with people who own exotic animals, especially big cats. The process of telling his story led him to Joe Exotic.

Nicknamed the “Tiger King,” Joe Exotic (real name: Joseph Maldonado-Passage aka Joseph Allen Schreibvogel) had a rough childhood, especially after he came out as gay to his family. He was seriously hurt in a suicide attempt, and his neighbor, who was a keeper at a wild animal park in Florida, brought tiger cubs to Joe as a therapeutic aid. That ignited Joe’s love of big cats, and he started to collect and breed tigers and other big cats himself, eventually building out a property in Oklahoma into GW Park, which draws thousands of visitors a year.

GW Park employs a group of people that like to think of themselves as “misfits,” like a zookeeper who had no experience with wild animals before being hired by Joe, or a park manager who walks on two prosthetic legs. Supposedly no major incidents had happened between the cats and either the employees or guests, despite the fact that guests pay for the privilege of petting tiger cubs and adults and kids are taken as close to the cat cages as possible.

While Joe has the biggest personality of anyone doing this — he offers merchandise, and has a YouTube-based weekly show  — he’s not the only one doing it, as we see when Goode interviews Bhagavan “Doc” Antle, who has tons of quirky personality himself. But Carole Baskin, who owns what she claims is a big cat sanctuary, is supposedly on the “good” side, though her park doesn’t seem to be all that different than Joe’s or Doc’s.

Baskin and her husband have declared themselves as animal rights activists, aligned themselves with PETA, and are aggressive with their efforts to shut Joe down, like calling malls who have had his exotic animal shows and putting in complaints to the point where the malls won’t ask him back. But Joe, ever at the ready with an arsenal of guns, claims in interviews that if the feds ever came to shut him down, they’d have a “mini Waco” on their hands. He constantly rails against Baskin on his YouTube show, and openly threatens her on more than one occasion.

Our Take: If you wanted one docuseries that could take you through the early days of social distancing, Tiger King should be the first one you fire up. Why? Because it’s true crime but not true crime; it’s about a segment of the population you generally only hear about when either there’s an arrest or when someone gets their face ripped off by a “pet” previously described as “peaceful”; it’s got characters galore and drama that rivals any new scripted show. Oh, and it’s got Joe Exotic. He’s more than enough to keep us watching.

Goode, who directed the series along with Rebecca Chaiklin, gets to know Joe pretty well, and spent enough time with him over the past five years to get Joe to open up and trust him. It’s not just about the sideshow of Joe’s life that it looks like from the outside; there’s a reason why Joe has attached himself so strongly to big cats and other wild animals, and why he was willing to defend his zoo to the death, even in the face of state legislatures and the U.S. Congress drafting bills to ban exotic animal ownership.

But the filmmaker also takes care to show that Joe, and his fellow big cat lovers like Doc Antle, are a breed apart (pun intended). There’s something slightly — or even significantly — broken about individuals who collect and breed animals that no person should own, and Goode makes sure that he shows that quality in both Joe Exotic as well as Carole Baskin. He definitely isn’t glorifying what any of them do and makes sure to show Baskin explaining why her cages are a safe environment for the big cats vs. the cages Joe uses. Goode shows how this whole segment of the population is driven by something that’s egocentric and vaguely narcissistic, no matter what the intentions are.

And we’ve just been through the first 45 minutes of a seven-part docuseries. At some point, Joe will hire someone to kill Baskin, and the journey to get to that point will be fascinating to watch, even though we know what the outcome to the case is.

Sex and Skin: Nothing, thank goodness.

Parting Shot: Shots of the county jail where Joe was in 2019. “Before this is over, I’m going to shut down everyone,” Joe says by phone.

Sleeper Star: This is a tie between John Finlay, Joe’s husband who does his interview with his shirt off and Rick Kirkham (the guy in the cowboy hat mentioned above), a former Inside Edition reporter who produced Joe’s YouTube shows.

Most Pilot-y Line: There is a difference between Doc Antel’s park and Joe’s. At Doc’s park, each tiger is fed the best raw meat and it costs $10k per year; Joe manages to feed each tiger for $3k per year, using a combination of cows that died in the field and large roadkill. Seeing the hungry tigers go after large cut-apart cow parts was tough to watch.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Tiger King is nuts, but it’s a good nuts. You may have red seething anger for Joe Exotic once you start watching, or you may sympathize with him. Either way, you won’t be able to look away.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

Stream Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem And Madness On Netflix