Maybe it’s the brain shrinkage from quarantine, but there hasn’t been anything quite like Netflix’s newest meme generator Tiger King that I can easily recall. It’s just something else – nearly every single key player in this documentary series about the wild world of midwestern big cat ‘zoos’ (read: farms) is an unabashedly terrible person, so lost in their narcissism and their real-world equivalents of community Facebook page group fights, and totally unable to see a slight shred of ethics violations.
Gay polygamist meth-dealer presidential & gubernatorial candidate Joe Exotic, the titular Tiger King, has emerged as the internet’s hero against the villain Carole Baskin, self-purported rescuer of big cats, who absolutely did murder her husband Don Lewis and is similarly batshit. You also see Bhagavan ‘Doc’ Antle, who is almost certainly going to go to prison by 2021 on the charges of running a sex cult in the same vicinity as where he shoots tiger cubs who get too old to be petted.
However, it is so easy to get lost in the truly buckwild world of Tiger King and forget that, above all else, all the big cats are the real losers in the constant power plays for supremacy these characters pull – they’re all fucking evil, all running a variation of predatory feudalism on their property, and their animals suffer direly for it. As funny as Joe Exotic is, he’s a predatory sack of shit. None of their fixations of obsession are remotely better off under their care, and that applies to anyone that falls under the animal kingdom.
8.5/10: Tiger Convict
