Tiger King

Scott Hardie | April 1, 2020
Ok, let's have it out. This show is all that anyone in America seems to want to talk about that's not the coronavirus. What do you think?

And if you haven't seen it, do. It's far more gonzo than even the NSFW trailer indicates.

Erik Bates | April 1, 2020
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Scott Hardie | April 3, 2020
Kelly binge-watched the series when it was released, so that she could have conversations with everyone talking about it. I'm a slower viewer and watched one episode daily. I don't know which way is better for this particular series.

Overall I enjoyed the series. It was certainly colorful and entertaining. I don't know that it has any useful message for society, however; it seems to be more about gawking at the freaks. It's trash TV with such high production quality that it seems better than it is.

However, I have to agree with Slate that the series was wrong to portray Carole Baskin so negatively. Among all of the principals, she's the only one not convicted of a felony, and the only one actually dedicated to helping animals instead of abusing them. Why does she get such a poisonous edit when she's the least evil main figure in the show? While it's necessary to dig into her husband's suspicious disappearance, since that event formed such a large part of Joe Exotic's narrative against her, I don't think that the series needed to devote an entire episode to that. Joe Exotic's relentless hatred of her is his tragic flaw that brings him down, and we needed to understand his feelings, but the show didn't need to drag her name through the mud to accomplish that. It's weirdly obsessed with making her seem morally equivalent to the men, and thus hypocritical, but I don't buy it. She's nowhere near as bad as Exotic or Doc Antle or Jeff Lowe.

I haven't been to Big Cat Rescue in Tampa, and I may or may not go now. I have been to Sarasota's Big Cat Habitat several times and really enjoyed it. I don't know where exactly they fit on the moral spectrum: They only take in animals that cannot be released into the wild, and they're as anti-breeding as Carole Baskin, but they do put on a daily show with a few of the big cats that are former circus performers. (Sarasota has a long history as a circus town.) They say that the animals need the routine of performing daily and it's good for them, but that doesn't sound very plausible to me.

Samir Mehta | April 3, 2020
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Scott Hardie | April 4, 2020
Apparently even the co-director wanted more focus on animal cruelty as a serious subject, rather than devoting so much of the screen time to the oddball people in the series. Maybe this creative failure will inspire him to take a bolder stance with his next documentary subjects. Certainly the popular success of this series will help him finance anything that he wants to make next.