I prefer reviewing movies over reviewing TV, mostly because opinions of TV take longer to formulate and continually vary since each new episode makes you evaluate what you’ve seen before in a new light. However, because I have great friends who politely asked that I review the show of Quaratine 2002: Tiger King.
I’ll have reviews of all 7 (I’m not counting the reunion episode) episodes of the mini series, as well as an overall grade for the show at the end.
| Episode 1 | Not Your Average Joe |
| Rating | |
| Quote of the Episode | “I’ve never been the type of person that has friends.” – Carole Baskin |
| Analysis | If you were writing a pilot for a TV show, you couldn’t come up with a premise much better than this one: the war between American big cat breeders and the “rescuers” who want to take them down. Our breeder is a man named, amazingly, Joe Exotic, a gay conservative capitalist of a human being who owns an Oklahoma farm allowing guests to play with tigers, lions, etc. His opposite is Carole Baskin, an animal rights activist who wants to stop Joe’s profiteering cat breeding and…it’s pretty clear get that money from people visiting her animal enclave. Surrounding them are a host of amazing workers/followers, money, country music, and power struggles, setting the stage for all sorts of great storytelling. |
| Episode 2 | Cult of Personality |
| Rating | |
| Quote of the Episode | “I sold drugs to maintain my animal habit.” – Mario Tabraue |
| Analysis | As the title suggests, this episode dives into how the big cat game is an exercise in cult formation. Outside of our main rivals, we also meet Doc Antle, Joe’s mentor, and Mario Tabraue, a big cat breeder/owner who was the inspiration for Scarface. The episode is at its best showing how eerily similar Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin are in how they’ve built their cults (along with Doc). They’re the charismatic figurehead; they attract gullable, somewhat hopeless people, and use them to erect brands in their honor, usually for minimal to no pay, while actively taking advantage of these people, unknowingly. Joe and Doc come off pretty horribly here, but at least they’re honest; Carole’s self-righteousness gives her justification for her evils, a sign of how untehered from reality she is. I do wish we got more time with whistleblowers (there’s really only one); this episode feels like we only scratched the surface of the horrifying side of being in a cult you can’t really escape. |
| Episode 3 | The Secret |
| Rating | |
| Quote of the Episode | “She’s an angel sent straight from hell and one day you’ll find out.” – Gladys Lewis Cross, Don Lewis’s Ex-wife |
| Analysis | The amazing hook from the end of episode 2 lives up to the hype. We mostly leave Joe Exotic for this episode, and dive deep into Carole Baskin’s past, specifically, the mysterious disappearance of her ex husband, Don Lewis. As compelling as Joe Exotic is, Baskin’s personal history elevates the documentary’s story by adding in a true crime element. We dig into Carole’s pretty sad past, and how a sinister late night stalking from 20 years her senior Don Lewis (he left his family soon after) turned into a clean slate, as Baskin hit the jackpot with Lewis, a self made millionaire. The doc does a great job painting how addicted Carole got to this amazing new lifestyle, so when Don’s eye started to wander to younger, more Costa Rican women, the motivation was there for Carole to try to get him out of the picture. Painting an audacious but not totally implausible hit job, the doc raises lots of valid open questions related to the still open case on Don Lewis, while eliminating most of the other plausible explanations as to what could have happened. |
| Episode 4 | Playing With Fire |
| Rating | |
| Quote of the Episode | “There was so much confidence because he owned the world in his head.” Rick Kirkham, Joe Exotic’s reality show producer |
| Analysis | After the high of the last episode, we hit the series midway point, also it’s low point, because the story starts to pivot, forcing a hodgepodge of story into this episode. The best stuff is Joe’s goal to try to become a giant celebrity. The documentarians show how Joe equates attention and success to love and happiness, so we plunge head first into all sorts of attempts to get there: country music videos, reality TV, eventually settling on internet viral sensation. With each attempt, Joe’s hubris continues to grow, adopting part of the persona of his characters into his own, blurring the lines between the real world and the world in his head. He uses this new confidence to go after Carole Baskin online, staging several public humiliation campaigns and wading into the sinister waters of considering how he would execute her. Baskin shows her own internal hubris and mettle, fighting Joe with societal tools like lawsuits and attacking his pocketbook. In turn, Joe grows desperate and paranoid, distrustful of everyone around him. Crammed into the other half of the episode is our introduction to Jeff Lowe, a partying man and lothario with money who strikes a deal with Joe to bail him out. Lowe’s backstory is pretty generically fun and wild, but the story introduces him here because he’s going to be more important as the story goes along, not because it fits perfectly into Joe’s quest for hubris. |
| Episode 5 | Make America Exotic Again |
| Rating | |
| Quote of the Episode | “I already knew he was batsh*t crazy from our conversations at Walmart.” Joshua Dial, Campaign Manager for Joe Exotic’s Presidential and Gubernatorial campaign. |
| Analysis | In America, what’s the ultimate popularity contest and celebrity showcase? The political arena of course! Joe turns that internet fandom into a misguided run for President and Governor: hiring a campaign manager, participating in debates, making ads, you name it. While all this is going on, Jeff Lowe proves why he swooped in to help out Joe Exotic: because he’s a parasite, leeching stuff he wants out of Joe while he’s drunk on political power, like bringing in his friends Allen Glover and James Garreston to help profit off of the animals/zoo while removing those super loyal to Joe quietly. Jeff shows how he’s the king of taking all of the risks and assuming none of the responsibilities, putting them squarely on Joe’s burdened shoulders. The big moment is when something happens to one of Joe’s husbands, which drags Joe back to the harsh cold reality, realizing what Jeff is doing and starting to fight to take control of his zoo back. The directors show how Joe begins his freefall, letting Joe succumb to his worst impulses and disturbing thoughts, which become of interest to law enforcement because of their depravity. |
| Episode 6 | The Noble Thing To Do |
| Rating | |
| Quote of the Episode | “A few people got some karma comin’.” – Joe Exotic |
| Analysis | The penultimate episode of Tiger King is its best: a culmination of everything that came before it. After teasing us with Joe Exotic’s phone calls from prison, we finally see how he ended up locked up like one of his big cats. The brilliance of this episode is how each poor decision Joe made eventually bites him in the ass. Jeff Lowe makes all his power grabbing public to Joe, leaving him powerless as Carole Baskin, furious from Joe’s hubris driven TV/internet attacks, slaps him with lawsuit after lawsuit as she also tries to push laws against breeding large cats. After his (not) gay lover’s inadvertent suicide, Joe decides now is time to try to get rid of the bain of his existence: Carole Baskin. So after “intricately” planning out how he wants to murder her, he pays handyman/hitman Allen Glover $3,000 to go down to Florida to kill her. How do we know this? Because James Garreston, seeing his leeching is over, becomes an informant and records all of his meetings without anyone’s knowledge. Thank goodness, Glover has no follow through and uses the money on drugs instead, leaving Joe again on the hook for an awful crime because he put his trust in the wrong person. Tiger King’s brilliance is here: watching a man eat his own words because he’s surrounded himself with despicable people in a despicable profession. It’s disgusting, riveting, and propulsive, everything you want out of a great story. |
| Episode 7 | Dethroned |
| Rating | |
| Quote of the Episode | “It’s a collaboration between two of the strongest assholes in the industry.” – Tim Stark, Jeff Lowe’s new partner, for his Oklahoma zoo |
| Analysis | The series wraps also on a high, showing the fallout from the brilliant episode 6. Joe’s life of bad decision making finally catches up to him, with every illegal activity he mostly publicly engaged in coming up in his charges, and all his weaseley partners and people he mistreated testifying against the Tiger King so they don’t get investigated themselves, while also stripping Joe of all of his assets like vultures circling a dead animal. But like an animal fighting for survival, Joe show’s how revenge and surviving can be great motivators, now teaming up with PETA, the same PETA who tried to take him down for years, to take out Doc Antle, Jeff Lowe, and other big game breeders that did Joe wrong. It’s beautifully ironic, and a wonderful capper on the series, though leaving you a little wanting to see how Joe’s efforts pay off. Though, if Joe’s any indication, the ego’s of Jeff Lowe and Doc Antle will eventually lead them to make stupid, shortsighted decisions (as Jeff does at the end) that will get them a comeuppance. |
Series Overall Rating:
Series Overall Thoughts
This is a great American story, encompassing many elements Americans hold dear, and putting them into a story about a gay gun toting capitalist who makes money breeding large cats. This documentary shows the extremes of many things Americans hold dear, especially pet ownership. American’s connections to their animals show why Joe Exotic is so popular here, as he’s profiting off of that emotional high people get from the unconditional love of their animal friends.
Thematically, this is one of the richest shows in recent memory. We’ve got universal themes of absolute power corrupting absolutely. And we’ve got a modern story about the power of celebrity culture, and the hollowness that can exist at its center, as well as the nature of the blurred lines between the real person and the “social media” personality. Also brilliant is the similarity between Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin manifesting in a great study of how the best of intentions don’t lead to the best outcomes.
The only minor complaints I have is that we don’t have a full enough picture of this large cat world and how spread it is, as well as full closure on the story, which probably won’t happen until Joe loses his voice. In addition, the Baskin and Exotic murders need more time, as there’s lots of little details the doc glosses over that could use more exploration in their own right.