It makes her worse, not an entertaining freak, but a hypocrite and an elitist. In voiding the value of Baskin’s work, Tiger King doesn’t make her just like everyone else. He even offered a reward for anyone who could offer evidence leading to her arrest. This last charge was the core of Maldonado-Passage’s attack, the repeated allegation that Baskin killed her first husband, Don Lewis, under mysterious circumstances and got away with it. His grudge extended to protest visits to her property and a music video in which a Carole look-alike is shown feeding her dead husband to a tiger. Although his over-the-top invective is presented as a joke, it’s hard to laugh when he stuffs dildoes into the mouth of a blowup doll labeled “Carole” and shoots it in the head. Maldonado-Passage then began to air his operatic grudge for Baskin on his daily web series. Tiger King chronicles Maldonado-Passage and Baskin’s long-running feud, which began when Baskin successfully halted Maldonado-Passage’s lucrative cub-petting mall tours, cutting into his profits. The show encourages viewers to think of Baskin’s work as ethically bogus, and to see her as another dirty big cat abuser. Somehow, none of these men is the show’s villain. And there’s the star of the show, Joe Exotic, aka Joe Maldonado-Passage né Schreibvogel, the outsize, gay, polygamist, gun-toting, mullet-having, fame-obsessed Tiger King, who is currently serving 22 years in jail for a murder-for-hire plot. Each is ickier than the next: the former drug dealer who boasts he’s the model for Scarface and seems, compared with everyone else, pretty sanguine the bone-chilling authoritarian who collects wild animals and women the convicted felon who strangled his wife and uses tiger cubs to procure sex. The hybrid series, a docutainment that crossbreeds the formal respectability of a long-gestating documentary with the high-octane shenanigans of the wildest reality show, catalogs the major players in America’s big cat scene, the egomaniacs and weirdos who keep, breed, and traffic wildcats in captivity.
Netflix’s quarantine hit Tiger King introduces audiences to a sordid menagerie of human beings. Insecure Had One Last Trick Up Its Sleeve.The Casual Fan’s Guide to The Book of Boba Fett