Hi friends and welcome back to TV Tuesday! I hope you’re all continuing to stay safe and healthy! Two sunny days in a row; ☀️I honestly can’t complain. Today I’m going to be talking about the very popular Netflix series, Tiger King.

So, e-v-e-r-y-o-n-e has been talking and raving about this new documentary on Netflix. I was just going to ignore it and move on, but when I was told that I would probably like it… well then I had to see what it was about… and of course blog about it!

I went through this episode by episode writing my thoughts (as I usually do) and woah, I have to say I feel like my notes aren’t cohesive because this show was not… you think you know what’s going to happen… BAHAHA jokes on you. Secondly, the way this was presented felt so skewed; you were supposed to think Joe was a good guy, then you were to think Carole is the devil, then oh no introduce bad guy Jeff, oh no wait Joe is actually horrible… it’s a freakin’ trip.

The first episode is really info-dumpy because we’re just learning about what it’s all about. It’s starts with a lot of news clips and it takes until the end of the first episode to realize that one of the main players is in prison.

There were a lot of moments where I was like: what am I watching?! There were just so many weird moments, I just don’t know how else to describe them, haha, if you’ve seen the show I think you’d understand.

So the basic premise is the good vs. the bad of keeping wild cats as pets and whether it’s ultimately good for the cats.

On the one side we have Joe Exotic a guy who loves large cats and who has opened a zoo in his brother’s honour to give people a chance to see these cats up close and to have a connection with the animals because Joe believes that all animals have a soul and should have a connection with people.

Then on the other side we have Carole Baskin who believes that anyone who tries to keep a wild cat as a pet and in captivity is wrong to do so (yet she has cats in captivity herself?). She’s an animal rights… or well a cat rights advocate and her life mission seems to be to take Joe Exotic down.

I can see that they both feel they are doing what they think is right, but they are on the complete opposite ends of the spectrums that there is never going to be a compromise. What you can see though at then end of the day is that they both love animals (oh boy was I wrong ☹️,). It’s really unfortunate that they can’t get along… like honestly they should use all the fuel and love they have for animals to work together… but alas that wouldn’t make for good tv now would it?

I think Joe may be a little crazy though (a LITTLE?). There’s clips of him shooting a shot gun at dummies who are to represent animal right advocates… but what I don’t get is… shouldn’t he be an animal right advocate if he loves animals as much as he says he does? (a warning sign that Joe is a lunatic?!) Like I get why he hates them, because they all want to take him down… but I don’t know from the first episode it doesn’t seem like he’s out here killing animals. (Oh how naïve I was! 😱)

I’m transfixed by the second episode because I don’t know what I’m watching! The episode starts with one of the employees getting their arm ripped off by a tiger… and you think oh this episode is going to be about how the media ran with this story and how Carole took this story and turned it against Joe… oh no.

No, we go down this rabbit hole about Joe and his two husbands, all three of them got married to each other, and you know, you do you, it just felt so random… like what does that have to do with the rest of this story?

We then learn about Doc, who is also a big-cat owner; we find out about this side of him who brings in young woman to help in his zoo, helping raise and train these tigers and to help bring in people… but of course he also likes to sleep around with these women and control everything they do. They interview someone who used to work for Doc and she just confirms it all, it all sounds so scary.

WHY DO ALL OF THESE PLACES SOUND LIKE A CULT?!?!?! (because they are?) So not only does working with Doc sound like this sex cult but even Carole’s “volunteers” sound like this cult too. It takes years to move up in the I don’t even know, system. Like there are different levels of being a volunteer and kinds different things.

But what’s funny is that both sides think they are brainwashing young people to join them for a bad cause. But at least Doc and Joe agree that they are a cult… Carole doesn’t think that she is, but she kinda is too.

HUH?! This show just, what?

The way they segue into different topics so drastically! One minute they’re talking about how these two camps, I’m going to call them, are cult like, the next they’re accusing Carole of killing her husband and saying that her husband had been missing for years, like what?! Where did that come from?

Okay, so the third episode kinda loses me. Like I understood the backstory of most of it… some of it was a little too much info. But after ending episode two on Carole feeding her husband to the tigers, we need some backstory on her husband Don.

Apparently this guy is like 22 years older than her and he really liked animals. We learn of Carole’s troubling and poor past and we learn of how they met. Apparently Don left his wife and family for Carole, but apparently he likes his women. So we find out he maybe had a girlfriend in Costa Rica and this causes speculation that this upsets Carole. There are even diary entries that went viral in which she states can’t stand all the cheating. A plausible reason for murder? (Carole is a strange, strange person. I don’t know if I truly believe she’s innocent; I honestly think she had some hand in the disappearance [or murder] of her husband.)

Don was a billionaire… not sure how or why is was one, but the man had a lot of money. So when they started to disagree on what to do with all their pets, (another reason for murder?) she thought to kill him (or at least make him go away) so that she can have the money to do her rescue mission that Don wasn’t into.

I absolutely HATE the musical interludes that happen in each episode; like why does Joe Exotic have to sing about everything? I don’t like musicals so these bits really grind my gears.

Don’s attorney is hella feisty! He doesn’t believe that Carole did anything to Don. But he can’t really prove that she didn’t not do anything either. But since there’s no body… no one can really prove anything. I think he’s in Costa Rica hahaha.

So, after missing five years, Carole declared him dead… interesting.

Episode four is about how Carole came after Joe with a lawsuit over a photo… that part is kinda boring; it’s two people that we know hate each other going after each other… it’s not really that entertaining. Things get interesting when someone burns down Joe’s studio where all the footage of everything for this reality show he planned on airing goes up in flames. (Although, it couldn’t have been everything because it seems like they still have a lot of footage for this documentary…)

At first people are blaming Carole, then they’re saying Joe did it… Joe, he thinks his producer did it. 🙄

Woof, then his mom gets involved. Joe is running out of money, so he goes to his parents… and of course once he does that Carole starts suing his mother too. Just wow. (By this point we are supposed to think that Carole is a complete monster, and Joe is still a good guy… bleh.)

Then this shady business guy, Jeff Lowe shows up… claims to be an expert in all this and really gains Joe’s trust… and then steals the zoo from Joe. (Enter “bad guy” Jeff. Jeff is a dick, but they made him out to be worse than Joe… but I don’t think that’s true.) 

I swear, just when I think I know where this show may go… holy hell am I ever wrong.

So episode five starts with Jeff, and we know that Joe gave the zoo to Jeff so that Carole won’t steal his zoo from him so I thought, oh we’ll now learn about Jeff… NOPE!

Apparently this guy, meaning Joe, decided to run for president… of America. Oh. My. God what am I watching? When he doesn’t win… oh shocker?! He runs for governor of Oklahoma.🙄

This spirals into Joe’s madness. (Oh, so now we’re going to get Joe’s true colours… when things don’t go the way he wants them to.) He can get so angry and he flips on a tiger who wants his shoes, in which a few episodes earlier he said that he’d never take a gun to his tigers… welp. (Welllll, apparently he’s been taking guns to more than just tigers for years… so that was all just lies.)

Now we’re diving into Joe’s love life again. We find out, again, shocker, that both of his husbands aren’t gay! They were both meth addicts, and people speculate that, that was how Joe kept them… fed their addiction in exchange for “love”.

We also find out that both of his husbands were 19 when they met.

The first one left Joe for his secretary, the second one, Travis… I wasn’t prepared for that.

Holy shit… Travis kills himself by shooting himself in the head. Travis was coming down from his high and Joe just wasn’t giving him what he wanted. We find out that he never let Travis leave the zoo and he was trapped pretty much. It’s so sad to think that Travis thought that the only way out was to kill himself. (Still not 100% sure if this is the truth… but I can believe that it was probably about 80% of the truth. I can see Joe trapping these men in for their fixes and them having no way out.)

So now Joe can’t continue his governor campaign until he finds another companion…

Oh god… he meets Dhillon another young man who is probably not gay either, but they get married… and Travis’ mom attends? That’s not weird at all, although to her credit she thought it was going to be a wedding with hundreds of people, not 5. (This has got to be warning sign like 500! This man is dangerous and a loose cannon; he doesn’t care about anyone’s wellbeing as long as he can keep people [or animals] in cages to manipulate to his will.)

Alright so this show goes back to Carole after taking a hard left turn. Joe is still obsessed with killing Carole… and after Jeff went to jail for I don’t care what, Joe and Jeff have a big falling out about the zoo and who owned it, Joe signing things off in Jeff’s name… so Joe takes off. He burns all this evidence, like wow, alright then.

So Joe hires a man to go out and kill Carole…

what he doesn’t know is that the guy who he hired is Jeff’s wingman. So Jeff knows all about it, because even though Joe doesn’t have enough to pay the guy, it’s not about the money it’s about taking Joe down. So when Jeff questions him, Joe can’t say anything. So Joe gets arrested for hiring someone to kill Carole. So that’s how he ended up in jail… this is all so messed up.

So, wait a second, Dhillon actually does love him? Or this yet another ploy to get us to believe this like the others?

Huh, so now they’re not only charging Joe for murder for hire but also for animal abuse. After Jeff took the zoo, they move it to Florida and while digging up crap they find tiger bodies… and it now comes out that he’d killed and abused them. (Only took us how many epiosdes to get here?) And now people who were once on Joe’s side, are testifying against him. Wooof, that must suck.

This one guy (the only guy who is still on Joe’s side through all this) says it very well:

he says that what started out as two people who were against each other, turned somewhere along the lines and they lost what the point of it all was, saving and preserving tiger lives. All the money that has gone into these lawsuits and and back and forth hate could have gone to the tigers.

I believe this 100%.

So in the end Joe was sentenced to 22 years in a jail… a place where a lot of people think he should be.

This was an interesting narrative. From starting off thinking Joe is a decent human to becoming aware that he’s actually one of the worst humans was just a crazy ride.

I have to say, that last episode called the “after show” was really intriguing. It was interesting to see where people from the show are now and how they feel about Joe. It’s amazing how for the most part all of them are not on Joe’s side. The stories that come out were also interesting, especially hearing from Rick the producer of Joe’s wanna be TV show… we find out from there that Joe was afraid of tigers and lions, like that was shocking. It was also shocking to see how much Joe didn’t actually like animals, just hearing the stories about how he shot them for no good reason, but because he’s such a smooth talker, he could convince people it was for a good cause. Ugh.

Would I recommend this to people? Probably not. Was it entertaining, I won’t lie it was so if you’re into one man’s ticket to fame, then sure.