Subcultures are sometimes able to surprise you. I can remember watching an episode of Louis Theroux dealing with exotic animals and it was unbelievable to me that some people would like to keep a tiger. Yet this is extremely popular in America. In fact, it is so popular that only in North America more tigers live in captivity than the number in the wild. Mike Tyson had a Bengal tiger for 16 years, but as the Netflix documentary Tiger King shows, there are always people who are even more extreme.
The focus of the series is mainly on Joe Exotic, also known as the Tiger King. With his bleached mullet haircut, many earrings and a lack of a filter, he is a special appearance. He runs a small zoo, but has been arguing with animal activist Carole Baskin for a long time. The viewer can decide to what extent her being an activist is true, because she also earns money from visitors to her center. It soon becomes clear what is going on in this world. How successful “collectors” get their money, how they treat the animals and their employees and what extreme things they are able to do.
Tiger King is such a Netflix documentary series that, whether you like it or not, gives you the feeling that you have to binge it. The events in each episode are so shocking and surprising that you wonder what will happen next. It is one big accident that you cannot turn away from. The fascinating thing is that the creators of the series have been able to interview everyone and you as a viewer keep guessing about the final outcome. And if you see the credits after seven episodes, you can only reach a number of conclusions. First, that keeping these kinds of animals should actually be forbidden, and second, that the people who are in this world are people that you could not make up yourself. And if you did you would be criticized for being them being too unrealistic. Check out at least one episode of Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness and chances are the series won’t let you go.
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I agree it’s a captivating mini-series that is hard to stop watching. The only thing missing for me was for the filmmakers to ask Joe tough questions about fame, guns, women, and the treatment of animals. But we have the L Theroux 2011 interview (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WSGsgrhppA )which sort of did that.
Sorry, that was the wrong link!