Tiger King is the only show that's crazier than the real world

Slate

"Being crazier than the world outside is an awfully high bar to clear right now," says Sam Adams. "But the Netflix documentary Tiger King soars over it with room to spare. A self-described 'gay, gun-carrying redneck with a mullet' who amasses one of the country’s largest collections of wild cats, Joe Exotic (né Schreibvogel) would be a full meal for a more sedate series, but directors Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaiklin serve up a seven-course, five-hour banquet of off-the-wall characters, enough to justify their subtitle: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness. Tiger King is also a sprawling, ethically shaky mess, starting off as an abstracted, Errol Morris–style character study (complete with knockoff Philip Glass score), shifting to a first-person filmmaker-on-a-quest framing, then settling into the familiar shape of a tabloid-TV magazine show—and that’s just within the first 10 minutes. The opening teaser spoils what ought to be the story’s big reveal—that Joe, the garrulous, animal-loving proprietor of a private zoo, ends up in jail as part of a murder-for-hire plot—in the name of hooking viewers early, and the series keeps cutting back to phone interviews with him as it meanders its way toward its sordid conclusion. Goode told Vanity Fair that Netflix pushed to emphasize the story’s outsize personalities at the expense of the animal-rights themes he saw as its core, and the result is that when Tiger King tries to wrap up its lessons with a tidy bow, it feels like the conclusion to an entirely different series. That said, with characters like these, the temptation to throw everything else aside and just gawk at them open-mouthed is a hard one to avoid.

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• What is so searingly brilliant about Tiger King is that the directors allow space for the individual character’s depraved spirits to unfold
• Why Joe Exotic's country music is perfect for our crazy times: "Unlike our current delusionary-in-chief, Joe Exotic actually seems to possess some discernible talent," says Hunter Kelly. "While running his GW Zoo in Wynnewood, Oklahoma, with his ragtag staff of misfits, he recorded two albums’ worth of country songs about his complex, checkered life. Shockingly, they’re not terrible. In fact, they’re even quite good. Like Hank Williams Jr. sang before him, he’s living out the songs that he wrote, re-creating his outrageous exploits in high-concept, low-quality music videos on YouTube."
• Breaking down five of Joe Exotic's wildest music video moments
• Carole Baskin isn't the only Tiger King subject ticked off at the docuseries: “We are very disappointed that our facility was mentioned in the new Netflix series,” says Myrtle Beach Safari owner Bhagavan Antle, who appears in Tiger King with his multiple wives.
• Joe Exotic files a $79 million lawsuit against U.S. Department of Interior and the U.S. Federal Wildlife Service