YMMV / Tiger King

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• Alternative Character Interpretation: Because almost everybody who's interviewed is an Unreliable Narrator to some degree, they always downplay their own faults and exaggerate those of their rivals or former business partners. As such, there's a lot of dispute among viewers about some of the finer details of what went down and the motives of the people involved.
  • Joe Exotic himself. Was he a bad person from the start whose mask only started slipping later, or did he slowly grow into the manipulative, paranoid Attention Whore he ultimately became? Many people who knew him describe him as a kinder, more gentle person as a young man, especially when his brother Garold and his first husband were still alive. His surviving brother Yari thinks he was always like this and that Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse, but he also outed Joe to their father, and harbors deep resentment because of an old dispute over the use of Garold's life insurance policy.
  • Was Travis' death really an accident, or was he just pretending it to be an accident, and really did intend to kill himself? The person who witnessed it (Joshua Dial) at least believes it to be the former.
  • Did Jeff Lowe intend to force Joe Exotic out of his own zoo from the start? Was he simply fed up with Joe's antics and criminal behavior? Or did he feel he had to get rid of Joe to protect his own parole? And just how involved were he and Allen in the murder-for-hire scheme? Season 2, where Allen claims that they hastily adapted a plot to kill Joe, adds more fuel to the fire.
  • Did Carole Baskin really kill her second husband (and if so, in what way?), or is it a malicious lie spread by her enemies? Also, does she genuinely care about her animals, or is she just using them for her own financial gain, making her not so different from the private zoo owners?
  • Don Lewis, the husband Carole is accused of killing. Innocent victim, or shady sexaholic with mafia ties, whose disappearance was at least partially his own fault? If Carole did kill him, was she a black widow manipulating and murdering an innocent man for his money? Or was she just eliminating a partner in crime, and a mutually dysfunctional relationship?
  • Rick Kirkham, while typically considered to be one of the more objective and blameless people involved in the whole affair, also admits that he basically conned Joe by agreeing to help him film his daily vlog while expecting to make millions of dollars off him with his own reality show about Joe, even boasting that he "owned" him because of their contract when Joe started complaining that it was an unfair deal.
• Award Snub: Despite high praise and large publicity, the series was completely shut out from that year's Emmys in favor of ESPN's The Last Dance, which ultimately won Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series. In hindsight, though, this seems completely justified, as the general public and critics view Tiger King as little more than a dumb fad a year later.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • Even by the docuseries's standards, the scene of James Garretson riding a jet ski — all set to the backing of "Eye of the Tiger" — has been seen by many as out-of-place and weird.
  • One of Allen's interviews inexplicably has him sitting in the tub.
  • At one point, John Reinke shows up driving heavily-modded car with a skeleton riding shotgun. By that point, things are already so weird that the show doesn't even bother to explain it or pay any special attention to it.
• Catharsis Factor: Jeff Lowe has been such a massive Hate Sink and Karma Houdini throughout the show, it's very rewarding to see him losing all the animals he underfed and kept in tiny cages and getting arrested for drunk driving after Drowning His Sorrows in Season 2.
• Common Knowledge: One of the show's most memorable moments was when Saff got his arm ripped off by a tiger. But that's not exactly what happened; in reality, the arm was still attached, but got mauled so badly in the attack that Saff opted to have it amputated instead of getting reconstructive surgery. To be fair, however, even Joe (who was there when it happened) seemed to have initially believed the tiger ripped his arm off.
  Saff: Joe and John Reinke had already come to the hospital to see me, and I specifically remember Reinke handing me a pen, and I picked it up, and I wrote my name, and then I handed it back to him. So my hand was still a functioning hand at the time, just really bandaged up and in a lot of pain. But the next morning, the surgeon came in, and said, "Hey, Saff, it's gonna be—y'know—about two years of reconstructive surgery." He said, "Or you can amputate it." And I said, "Amputate it."
• Critic-Proof: The second season was met with a much more hostile response than the first, but it didn't stop it from getting 30 million hours streamed in its opening frame.
• Do Not Do This Cool Thing: As mentioned below, there are a lot of people who find Joe likable despite all the awful things he does, and think the idea of privately owning tigers and lions is cool no matter how many times the show points out that it is a terrible idea.
• Draco in Leather Pants:
  • Although the consensus is that the documentary features people who are all terrible — save for ones like Saff, there are viewers who finish it with the takeaway that all its other main subjects (Carole, Doc) are terrible and Joe Exotic... somehow isn't, when he's the only one of the three with criminal convictions and, as the documentary's main subject, has his greed and abuses chronicled the most often and in the most detail. There's also the fact that he's in his 50s and has had at least more than one barely legal husband, often fresh out of high school and drugged up. The lack of antipathy for Joe seems to come largely from the fact that, compared to the scheming opportunists and charming narcissists that are his peers, Joe comes across as merely impulsive and delusional, getting outmatched at every turn by the likes of Carole and Jeff.
  • Plenty of people were taken aback by how pretty the young Carole Baskin was◊, mostly earning comparisons to Amanda Seyfried. This is often acknowledged begrudgingly, though there are some for whom her beauty in youth has genuinely made her more sympathetic to them. Even setting aside that, a fair number of viewers seemed to have walked away with the conclusion that because Joe Exotic is a monster, Carole must be a saint, despite the fact that the series highlights her numerous flaws and shows her to be an Unreliable Narrator as well.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Saff. He's been consistently praised by reviewers for his sincere loyalty to the animals, his calm and mellow demeanor, and for being one of the very few people in the entire mess who's not completely horrible.
  • Erik Cowie for being an Animal Lover and a genuinely Nice Guy despite his rough exterior. Fans also love his blunt attitude and Sophisticated as Hell way of speaking.
  • John Reinke is liked by a lot of viewers due to his inspirational story, his level-headedness and his touching loyalty to Joe, leaving many wishing they could have a friend like John.
  • Mario Tabraue due to somehow managing to come across as one of the more sane people in the documentary despite being a (former) drug kingpin. He also appears to have a lot more care for the animals in his possession than the other big cat owners, owing to the fact that when he was young his mother forbade him to have any pets.
• Harsher in Hindsight: In the special bonus episode "The Tiger King and I", Erik Cowie briefly acknowledges his past struggles with alcoholism while being interviewed by Joel McHale ("I used to have a drinking problem, but now I do not"). Cowie died suddenly in September 2021 due to complications from alcoholism.
• Hype Backlash: The series saw a surprise surge in popularity due to the COVID-19 pandemic, with its Serial Escalation of events being compared to that of 2020's. This publicity has also lead to some backlash from viewers who think that the series is overhyped, criticizing it for its sensationalism and its viewers for buying into it. It does not help that some viewers may find the series hard to watch due to it being a constant chain of horrible events.
• Informed Wrongness: The documentary frames its footage to imply that Carol takes issue mainly with the fact that Joe is breeding big cats and letting visitors pet the cubs. The footage used does not explain what the problem with that is. The reason? Cub petting means the cubs are away from their mother all day. While babies are supposed to nap a lot, cub petting means constantly waking them up. The people doing the petting aren't taught how to hold a cub safely, or even made to wash their hands, exposing the cubs to tons of germs as well as injury.
• Iron Woobie: Saff, who after getting his arm ripped apart by a tiger, is given the choice of two years worth of reconstructive surgery in an ongoing media circus or amputation, chooses amputation and is back to work in ten days time, with no hard feelings towards Joe (who probably deserved it) or the cats.
• Love to Hate: This is a documentary filled with people who are morally dubious at best, but the sheer absurdity of their actions, combined with an awkward charisma have caused many of these real life figures to gain a certain level of popularity, for lack of a better word.
• Memetic Loser: Howard Baskin is often seen as this, as he comes off as an overly submissive Henpecked Husband to his wife Carole.
• Memetic Mutation: Given the docuseries's overall bizarre nature, it's no surprise that it spawned a large menagerie of memes.
• Memetic Psychopath: Carole Baskin, of course. The possibility that she was involved in the death of her husband, if not that she did the deed herself, dangles over her head in every scene she's in. The way she talks about the rumored ways her husband died and what may have made a tiger attack Joe, which just scream textbook Suspiciously Specific Denial, just do not help her.
• Misaimed Fandom:
  • Many fans of the docuseries have been championing for the release of Joe Exotic from prison, despite how he attempted to hire a hitman against Carole Baskin as well as the fact that he was an abuser to both people and animals.
  • Quite a few people have been using Tiger King as an excuse to claim all zoos and aquariums are abusive and dangerous to animals. This is despite the fact people like Joe Exotic run private zoos (in contrast most “mainstream” zoos are nonprofit organizations and fully accredited) and most zoos/aquariums aren’t nearly as bad as theirs.
  • Somewhat disturbingly, there's also a camp of people who completely miss the series' message against owning big animals as pets, and instead come to the exact opposite conclusion of how cool owning tigers and/or other big animals would be.
• Narm Charm: Joe Exotic's understated reaction to being mauled by a liger on camera, acting more annoyed than shocked when he's nearly killed.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • One of the later episodes shows security camera footage of Travis shooting himself in the head. While there is thankfully no footage of the body shown, the sheer surprise and horror factors of the footage are enough to shake even the most iron-willed of viewers. It's made even worse with Joshua Dial's shocked reaction, also caught on camera.
  • Doc Antle is living nightmare fuel. Despite portraying himself as a conservationist, he is incredibly cruel and petty towards both his animals and staff, to the point where many of his followers are afraid that he will kill them if they turn on him. In one scene, Steven recounts how Doc threatened to murder him for walking in on something he shouldn’t have (Doc doing something with a big bag of money), even going as far as to stick a screwdriver against his throat.
• One-Scene Wonder: Mario Tabraue, a former drug kingpin who was reportedly part of the inspiration for Scarface (1983), is interviewed with some of his pet tigers. It says a lot about the show that he only merits appearing for one segment of one episode, during which he comes across as practically the Only Sane Man.
• Ron the Death Eater: In spite of being somewhere between A Lighter Shade of Grey and A Lighter Shade of Black compared to the other tiger-keepers, Carole Baskin is often treated as every bit as bad as them due to the rumors that she killed her second husband, which were started — and perpetuated — by her business rivals, and were never decisively proven. And that's not even touching on the fact that Don himself wasn't exactly a saint, throwing the circumstances and motivations surrounding his death into even more question.
• Seasonal Rot: Critics felt that the show appeared to have ran out of ideas by Season 2, resulting in a Rotten Tomatoes score of 18% compared to Season 1's 85%. This was probably to be expected, since the first season documents nearly 20 years of bizarre events in the private zoo world, while the second season is basically an extended "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue.
• Squick:
  • The trailers in which Joe houses his employees are filthy, roach-infested rat holes.
  • To keep overhead costs down, Joe feeds his animals expired meat donated by Wal-Mart, which is transported to the animal park in an unrefrigerated truck. His underpaid employees feed themselves with the same expired meat. One employee is shown sifting through the day's meat donations, lifting out a bag of chicken nuggets, and marveling that they were still frozen. How much of the meat is spoiled? How much rotten meat are the animals and employees eating?
  • At one point, Joe opens up a pizza restaurant in the zoo, and the toppings are revealed to be from the same stocks of expired meat from the local Walmart that are fed to the tigers (and employees).
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: One major criticism of the documentary is that it skims over the big cats and their treatment in favor of the eccentric human characters. Many animal-loving viewers hoped that it might've shone a brighter light on the abuse exotic animals in the U.S. face, but focus is only put on the big cats early in the series.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: With the exceptions of Erik, Saff and arguably John Reinke, there is not a single individual among the major players who's truly likable, and the entire series is filled with the relentless abuse of both animals and people. These two factors put the series in the category of "hard-to-watch" for some people.
• The Woobie:
  • The big cats, as they are constantly abused by all sorts of people and ultimately don't benefit from the slapfights between their keepers. Thankfully, thirty-nine of Joe Exotic's tigers (along with three bears of his) are now being cared for at a Colorado sanctuary.
  • Don Lewis' first wife and his daughters. Even if Don himself might be a pretty shady character who may or may not have been murdered by his second wife, they absolutely did not deserve the abhorrent treatment by which Carole largely cut them out of Don's will.

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