Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness (2020) s01e08 – The Tiger King and I

At the end of The Tiger King and I, host Joel McHale—sitting in his living room because the coronavirus pandemic has him in lock down (the Trump Flu plays a big part, presumably, in all the interviewees ready availabilities)—makes a crack about how there’s nothing he won’t do for money, implying Netflix hired him to do the special.

Except McHale’s an executive producer. Did Netflix have to woo him with that credit—and did it actually work—or did he pitch them on the idea, sitting around in his living room, FaceTime-ing with eight of the “Tiger King” regulars. Not Carole Baskin, who everyone thinks killed her husband. Instead it’s all Joe Exotic’s former pals; they all think he belongs in prison, some hoping he dies in there, some thinking he deserves to be released.

Pretty much everyone except “still wants to be a campaign manager” Joshua Dial and “still an abject scumbag ‘Inside Edition’ producer” Rick Kirkham think the documentarians—not involved with this after show—did a terrible job as far as accurately presenting them. Given Saff Saffery is a man, yeah, they did a bad job presenting people. Also, McHale shouldn’t be the one to finally address whether or not the suicide Dial witnessed (on camera too) was intended as a suicide.

Spoiler: per Dial, it wasn’t. Might have been nice to know during that section of the documentary.

At the same time you have John Finlay talking about how the shirtless interviews were his idea.

Does current zoo owner Jeff Lowe come off better? A little. A government conspiracy seems a lot less likely all of a sudden for whatever reason. And his wife, Lauren Lowe, shows more agency than she ever did in the actual show.

Lowe’s still a scuz and can’t resist the opportunity for a homophobic Joe Exotic impression.

The regular people employees of the park—Erik Cowie, John Reinke, Saff–seem more than willing to talk about Joe Exotic shooting animals so you wonder why the documentary makers didn’t talk to them about it. At the end, Rick Kirkham seems to start to say, “I shot a tiger,” but changes it over to Joe Exotic. They were talking about the regularity of shooting tigers… big slip there. Can’t imagine it’d have gone over on “Inside Edition.”

There are some horrifying further stories about the zoo and Joe Exotic’s running of it, which also seem like they should’ve been part of the main series. Incidentally, McHale mentions multiple times it’s the most popular documentary of all time, which is true and terrifying.

For the streaming equivalent of a cash grab, it’s not bad. It’s nice to get some idea of just how much the filmmakers of the series were manipulating things. Misgendering a main interviewee seems like a big one.

The special’s just as manipulative, of course; between the whitewashing of Kirkham and McHale’s “gesturing down” mentions of Wal-Mart, it’s not like it’s so Netflix can retroactively establish some integrity for it. Should they? Eh. But I’d probably rather watch a diss series against the filmmakers than the movie version everyone keeps talking about.

Especially since no one casts it as well as I did….

Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness (2020) s01e07 – Dethroned

Based on his interviews this episode, it appears Jeff Lowe spent years getting Joe Exotic more and more enraged over Carole Baskin so at some point Lowe would be able to convince Exotic to hire someone to kill her. Possibly even just Allen Glover. Both “Doc” Antle and Joshua Dial think Joe was set up. Lowe attests he did mean to encourage Joe to do it, which isn’t a crime apparently.

A number of people find it highly suspicious the government let Lowe and Glover go, including reporter Sylvia Corkill. Meanwhile federal prosecutor Amanda Green cooperates with the filmmakers so much she performs some of her closing arguments at Joe’s trial for them?

Except they didn’t just get Joe on trying to hire someone to kill Baskin, they got him on violating the endangered species act because it turns out Joe killed five tigers at some point. It really pissed off the zoo employees at the time, which means directors Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaiklin maybe knew about it and decided to just keep it quiet for best effect later.

The jury finds Joe guilty and he’s sentence to twenty-two years. Once instead he decides to sell all the big cat owners he knows out to PETA, which is good. There’s a card at the end about how “Doc” Antle got raided; Joe says Antle has a gas chamber to get rid of the aging tiger cubs, so, you know, fuck him.

Despite “investigating” her for murder, “Tiger King” gives Carole Baskin a positive send-off. Her husband comes off like a tool but whatever.

And things don’t go well for Jeff Lowe. He screws over major creep Tim Stark leaving him without a zoo partner, which really just screws over the tigers. No one really gives a shit about the 200 tigers Joe Exotic had in his zoo. Given one of the interviewees even brings it up, you’d think it’d get some attention but no.

Rick Kirkham plays victim again, says how bad he felt showcasing an abusive-to-animals Joe Exotic and making him appear loving, which doesn’t track with his previous interviews or the other footage of him….

As for Exotic, there’s at least some footage showing he’s aware of the damage he’s done to the animals.

Oh, and James Garretson playing himself as the hero in the whole thing is ick.

“Tiger King” is extremely compelling and ultimately distressing.

I don’t think I want to see a movie of it, even with a dream cast. It’s too much, too sad.

Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness (2020) s01e06 – The Noble Thing to Do

So now we’ve got the downfall of Joe Exotic, promised in the first episode, the pieces not aligned until now.

Businesses undefined businessman Jeff Lowe has returned to Oklahoma after basically getting run out of Las Vegas to discover Joe has been forging his name on multiple documents in addition to using zoo money on his presidential and gubernatorial campaigns. Like, campaign manager Joshua Dial is obviously on the premises all the time, clearly Joe wasn’t hiding it too much.

So after hearing the Feds are investigating Joe Exotic and now the embezzling, it’s time for Joe to go. Somehow he has enough time to burn all the documents showing his fraud and all the computers, plus sell a bunch of the animals for cash, and run off with new husband Dillon Passage and at least one cub. Joe’s on the lamb. From what, no one knows yet.

Except James Garretson, strip club owner, who’s helping the Feds investigate Joe Exotic. See, James knows how Jeff Lowe and Joe Exotic planned to have Carole Baskin killed. Or something. Jeff Lowe talks about it a lot, so he’s clearly not worried about being prosecuted—he was the only one who could use Google Maps—but then again, maybe it’s just the deal Jeff made because after James turns CI and sells out Allen Glover (prison Nazi maybe Allen Glover so he’s completely unsympathetic), Jeff Lowe wants to rat out Joe Exotic too. Everyone wants to drop the dime on Joe Exotic.

A lot of it is low-key homophobic. Something about the way Glover and James talk about Joe and the husbands… plus last episode established Lowe’s a bigot too.

But, wait, given the show plays so fast and loose with its interview timelines and whether or not interviewees are alive or dead… did Glover kill Carole Baskin? Nope, he took Joe Exotic’s money and got high and didn’t do it and can’t remember anything, which sounds like absolute nonsense but then… what’s Glover going to admit on camera.

The episode ends with Joe in prison, whining, and one hoping local news reporter Sylvia Corkill, who covered a lot of Joe Exotic news, gets to write a book about it at least.

Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness (2020) s01e05 – Make America Exotic Again

So, luckily, businessman Jeff Lowe beating tigers at the end of last episode was just a horrifying teaser not the actual content of this episode. In fact, Lowe doesn’t hit a single animal in this episode. They don’t even use the footage again. And the ominous “Jeff Lowe takeover” of the zoo… it wasn’t as immediate as last episode implied. I’d be very curious to see how Rebecca Chaiklin and Eric Goode would have presented this story in a three hour piece; there’s so much information they withhold for effect; master manipulation.

For example, the reason we don’t see anything of Joe’s newest husband, Travis Maldonado? Because he’s dead. He killed himself. Possibly accidentally, possibly not, in front of Joe Exotic’s campaign manager, Joshua Dial. Campaign manager for what? President.

See, back when Lowe took over the park and did things like open the “watch the cats” pizza parlor (with the pizza made from spoiled Walmart ingredients), Joe Exotic also got the idea to run for President. His wacky campaign ads made it national on “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” and got Joe enough attention he was able to get a campaign manager, Dial. Also from Walmart. Dial ran the ammo counter.

Around the same time husband John Finlay knocks up the desk clerk at the zoo and they run off together because, turns out, Finlay wasn’t gay all those years—no one on the show seems familiar with the concept of bisexuality; anyway, the reason Finlay stuck with Joe Exotic was because of meth. Joe kept him high all those years. Once the presidential campaign goes bust, then the subsequent governor one, Joe Exotic starts getting really nasty with everyone. He can’t stand Jeff Lowe’s point-man in the zoo, Allen Glover, for instance. There’s also a sequence where Joe shoots at the tigers (because they’re annoying him). It’s very uncool and disturbingly presented.

So after Travis dies, Joe’s even more upset, leading to him marrying another nineteen year-old two months later—Dillon Passage. Dillon doesn’t get the same kind of interviews as everyone else because we’re getting close to the present and Chaiklin and Goode are sort of done manipulating the viewer with clips from different time periods. See, this episode is where everything catches up to Joe Exotic and he’s arrested. Why? We don’t know, just the Feds are after him, which Jeff Lowe finds out because the bank tells him.

It’s a really interesting episode, but it’s also a cheaply played one. There’s actual footage of Travis killing himself—or at least of Dial witnessing it—and they cut it for exploitative effect. It’s actually surprising they don’t put music over it.

Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness (2020) s01e04 – Playing with Fire

This episode’s about how awful both Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin turn out to be when it comes to money. Baskin’s won a lawsuit against Joe Exotic and he owes her a cool million. Carole and Howard aren’t doing it to prove a point or to stop Joe from doing his cub petting roadshow, they’re doing it to bleed him dry.

The problem with bleeding Joe Exotic dry is he’s pretty smart about putting everything in other people’s names so it doesn’t seem like he owns anything. And when they do start trying to squeeze that stone… well, it’s just going to hurt Joe’s sweet old mom, who had the zoo in her name or something, which leads to Joe’s mom on the streaming channel talking about how Baskin’s been hounding her.

Again, really want to know how many people watched these streams.

Meanwhile, Rick Kirkham is making his reality show and trying to get Joe Exotic to amp it up. Kirkham doesn’t need to push hard because give Joe the chance, he’ll play mean private zoo boss all on his own.

But all suing Joe Exotic’s going to do is starve the animals and it never seems like Baskin—Howard speaks the most this episode—has any concern for the tigers. When we hear about the settlement Joe Exotic turns down, there’s nothing about what to do with the 200 tigers. You’d think it’d be a story thread to pick up on but the history intervenes. Joe’s new pal, “businessman” Jeff Lowe—you get the feeling people are going to investigate him after this series and he’s going to sue them all—is going to step in and save the zoo. So Joe puts it in Jeff Lowe’s name and Lowe steals it. The cliffhanger is Lowe beating the tigers. It’s swell.

Because the episode’s already upbeat after someone sets fire to Joe’s studio, which is the same building as the alligators and they all die. Kirkham’s footage gets destroyed too. Basically Joe Exotic and company think Kirkham did it, Kirkham thinks Joe Exotic did it.

Kirkham sort of has a better reason for not doing it—without his footage, the reality show is just… but, seriously, he didn’t make backups? In like, 2015 or something. He could have pretty easily made back-ups. It’s a weird screw-up.

But then Kirkham had screwed Joe out of his own Internet streaming show so motive for Joe. The show doesn’t look too hard into it before Lowe shows up to ruin the day.