Tiger King's phenomenon is frustrating -- it's like a vicious spectator sport in which the players are poor workers and the abusive narcissists who exploit them

Variety

In just three weeks, the Netflix docuseries has become inescapable with nine lives on the internet -- even President Trump was asked about it this week. "I really should’ve known better," says Caroline Framke, "given the track record of other Netflix docuseries, which could (and probably do) have their own Netflix category along the lines of 'too crazy to be true — or is it?!' Netflix’s track record with shows about true crime (see: Making a Murderer) and wild cults of personality (see: Wild Wild Country) is that they balloon into pop culture phenomena that flood the entertainment news cycle for a few weeks before fading from view to let the next circus roll into town. Tiger King, which manages to combine both those genres into a single disgusting gumbo in which the worst players rise to the top, was destined to follow suit, nationwide quarantine or no. But it’s especially frustrating to watch Tiger King make its staggering climb in popularity when, as I concluded when I first watched the series, it’s just not very good." Framke adds: "At such an awful time in the world, when dumb pleasure is scarce and sorely needed, it’s not in anyone’s best interest to be a jerk about benign things that can distract people for a minute. But Tiger King isn’t benign. It’s an opportunistic grab at relevance that fails to shed any light on its subjects because it’s far too busy gaping at them. Showing their lives with an eye towards entertainment is an understandable instinct; it would be much harder to grab this much attention without some degree of compelling storytelling. And yet the way in which Tiger King goes on autopilot, indulging stereotypes and flattening complex events into titillating bites, turns everything it touches into a joke. This would be bad enough were it a scripted show, but Tiger King is about real people, real tragedies, real abuse and harm done in the name of fame and fortune. Telling these stories responsibly might have been more a bummer, but it would have, at the very least, been more humane."

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• Tiger King is a moral failure: The Netflix docuseries is "the latest and most acute iteration of a Netflix trend toward extreme storytelling; the more unfathomable and ethically dubious, the better," says Sophie Gilbert. "The point is virality—content so outlandish that people can’t help but talk about it. In 2018, the docuseries Wild Wild Country set the model, with its jaw-dropping chronicles of an alternative Oregon faith community whose antics allegedly included spiritual orgies, gun hoarding, electoral fraud, and mass poisonings. Last year’s Abducted in Plain Sight captured the appalling story of a teenage girl who was abused and kidnapped by a family friend, seemingly in full view of her parents. With its reality programming, too, Netflix has been courting eyeballs with simple insanity, via the hit dating series Love Is Blind and the upcoming Too Hot to Handle, a show in which ridiculously good-looking people are sequestered on an island to compete for a cash prize that diminishes every time they hook up, or even masturbate. The more scurrilous or degrading the concept, the more we watch. This truism wasn’t news for P. T. Barnum, and it isn’t news now. But there’s still something wretched to me about the way Tiger King has managed to define a cultural moment in which empathy and communitarianism are so crucial. America right now, in the midst of a pandemic, is reliant on collective behavior, adhering to rules, and taking sensible precautions to avoid danger. Tiger King is the TV equivalent of licking the subway pole. Its characters have managed to construct whole worlds around themselves rather than curtail their worst impulses in any way. These characters are so colorful that they obliterate everything else around them. They’re any documentarian’s dream, and yet you can’t help but wonder what the directors hope to get out of giving showmen the mass exposure that they want. Who, in the end, benefits?"
• Tiger King isn’t just bad, but dangerous in a divided America persistently looking to reduce the other side to caricature: "In a presently ailing nation where TV is more voluminous and vital than ever, the truth is the March 20 launched Tiger King is a clawed white trash misery index," says Dominic Patten. "Gawking at some clearly fragile and damaged people like would-be reality TV star Exotic and their below the Mason-Dixon line antics, the series subsequently provides a cultural circus for those smug bicoastals under stay at home orders and screaming to rise up in moral superiority. Essentially, the tale of big cat collector, self-styled Oklahoma zoo proprietor and 2016 Presidential candidate Exotic (AKA Joseph Maldonado-Passage) and his ultimately unsuccessful attempt to have rival Carole Baskin knocked off by a hitman hired for $3,000, Tiger King is in that context more a zero-sum game, literally and figuratively, than hitting the zeitgeist."
• Tiger King allows us to see how we have a society that prioritizes freedom above all else, no matter the damage done: "Tiger King’s most powerful message might be about the people who have been elected and selected to keep us safe, to give wise counsel, and steer us through this crisis," says Jessa Crispin. "Most true-crime entertainment sings love songs to cops, giving us smart, eager detectives who just can’t get that one unsolved case out of their heads, who will tirelessly pursue truth and justice, no matter how long it takes. These men, and it’s almost always men, will be haggard and aged, so we can imagine all of their hard work and sleepless nights. Instead, Tiger King shows authorities for how they actually often are: fumbling, inadequate and drunk on power. The detective faced with finding Carole Baskin’s missing husband: well, gee, I don’t know, maybe one day we’ll find something or someone will say something. The prosecutor who may well be relying on the testimony of a liar to ensure the conviction of a defendant: well, golly, he sure seemed credible to me, seeing as how he said exactly the thing I wanted him to say."
• Blackfish producer: Tiger King is not the Blackfish of the big cat world
• Kristin Chenoweth performs a Broadway-style anthem in appreciation for Carole Baskin
• TMZ's Harvey Levin previews his Fox Joe Exotic special, featuring at least 15 interviews
• Watch a 7-minute "sizzle reel" of Joe Exotic's reality show pilot supplied by producer Rick Kirkham