By Glenn Dunks
Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness is the undisputed king of the internet right now. A zeitgeist that has steamrolled over a society that has been stuck inside, isolated with little else to do but binge and over-indulge on anything that distracts the mind and the body. Scratch beneath the veneer of its sneering Christopher-Guest-goes-to-the-trailer-park milieu and Tiger King proves to be lazy at best, morally corrupt at worst. Expanded out to an over-confident seven episodes, directors Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaiklin dig their series deeper into grimy, ethically dubious territory with little of that digging towards something substantial.
The story of Tiger King, though, is certainly interesting. How could it not be considering the ever-escalating crime saga of Joe Exotic, a private big cat zoo owner and operator whose life gravitates towards weird and weirder. He’s a true drama queen...
He has two husbands, an arch-nemesis who maybe killed her own husband and fed him to tiger,s an employee whose arm gets torn off, and acquaintances like a former cocaine drug lord who went on to own his own big cat zoo (and, as it turns out, was on stage with Britney Spears during her famous “Slave 4 U” performance at the VMAs in 2001).
As you can see—the title is accurate. There is indeed murder, mayhem and madness. Unfortunately, what it doesn’t have, just like a lot of these docu-series, is anything in the way of style. Beyond the Netflix house style, I suppose, which is nondescript in nearly every way. I guess they’re like Marvel that way (they hold the same sort of cultural sway, too, come to think of it). That turns out to be the least of Tiger King's problems, though.
It doesn’t take long into Tiger King’s 5-hour+ runtime for signs of something amiss. Five minutes, in fact, when the production team are distracted from their initial mission upon the discovery of a man transporting a snow leopard in the back of a very shady-looking van. “What is a snow leopard doing in the back of this hot van”, Goode asks. Would most of us call the police? I would hope so. And while the narration claims it is what set up a deeper dive into what makes people keep big cats in captivity in America, these opening moments eventually ring loud as warning signs of a production that has little interest in what is morally right and more interested instead in getting a wacky true crime story. One that, it is very easy to argue, only appears to unfold the way it does because of the direct involvement of the production crew who appear to gode these people on to do terrible things and spent five years filming animal abuse and an unfolding litany of suspicious, dangerous behaviour. I can almost hear the sound of rubbing their hands together in glee.
We could be here all week if I went step-by-step through everything about Tiger King that got my blood boiling (you can add misgendering one of its most significant figures, something I just discovered today). But I could overlook parts of that if the production was doing something with it all beyond blood-splattered yee-haw gawking for cheap laughs. What the series actually wants us to think about all of these ghastly humans besides, ‘gee, look at these white trash sideshow freaks’ is beyond me. Like last year’s Fyre documentary, the whole thing was so deeply unpleasant of an experience that even the momentary joys that are found in its absurd detours (skeletons in car passenger seats, jet ski montages and so forth) are too dipped in nihilistic meanness to elevate the material. With each new deranged character who is introduced, fodder for Hollywood casting memes that have only sought to highlight how it’s all one big joke, we learn less about them.
Similarly, across seven episodes, the unfolding menagerie of Joe Exotic and his cohort of animal-abusing dimwits never stops or even slows down to assess what story it really wants to tell. Like most Netflix docu-series, it is far too long with no clinical eye laid upon its runtime to decide what is essential and what can be done without. While its editing is technically proficient—especially when factoring in the assorted video sources to be corralled into one series—with no real ebbs or flows, it comes across like a young child reading a book report (or in this case, a very detailed crime report).
Ultimately, Tiger King is a failing of its production team. Feature-length periods of character assassination are coupled with an uncaring eye towards blatant animal cruelty and sexual predaciousness that mixes uncomfortably with class mockery and pungent misogyny. None of these horrific monsters get more than a second concerned glance when there is a perfectly superficial elbow to the rib and a smug grin to be done instead. I shudder to think at what was captured and not included because it didn’t fit neatly into the wacky narrative.
I understand the appeal of Tiger King, I do. Especially now in both isolation and the age of T***p. But it also disturbs me. The news that Kate McKinnon of all people is preparing a dramatic adaptation is frightening beyond words. It’s a series that grows more soul-deflating as the days go by. But because I want to leave it on something positive: I think Don’t F**k with Cats was actually very good and does better a lot of what Tiger King does not.
Release: Streaming now on Netflix.
Emmy chances: Definitely. Sigh.