Bonus ‘Tiger King’ Episode Emphasizes The Worst Of Joe Exotic

Netflix’s Tiger King already made Joe Exotic out to be an irredeemably unpleasant man. 

If the meth-fueled relationships Joe forged with vulnerable young men wasn’t enough, then his callous treatment of big cats, along with all his employees, should have convinced viewers that Joe Exotic is not the hero of this story – merely the protagonist. 

But charisma goes a very long way; many viewers, ironically or otherwise, seem to sympathize with Joe to some degree, under the impression that his imprisonment was unjust. 

An additional episode of Tiger King, titled The Tiger King and I, highlights how the people featured in the series really feel about Joe Exotic. Hosted by Joel McHale (I don’t know who he is either), the episode is a series of long-distance interviews, quarantine-style, featuring several of the show’s secondary characters; hence, no Carole Baskin, and no Joe Exotic. 

It’s not a particularly compelling piece of television, especially compared to the series, but it’s interesting to hear some of the guests reflect on their portrayal in the series, and hear some anecdotes that never made it on the show.  

The series implied that Joe’s imprisonment was met with some degree of remorse from his staff, but in this follow-up episode, all of them firmly state that Joe deserves his fate, even gloating that Joe is unable to bask in the glow of the spotlight, being behind bars.

Although the series highlighted some sickening behaviour from Joe, the filmmakers, in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, admitted to editing out instances of Joe’s racism:

“Joe is a racist, I would say categorically. He said things when we were filming that were very unsettling …. They didn’t have a context in the story, but he has a lot to learn.”

Presumably, those scenes were removed to ensure that the audience didn’t hate the protagonist of the series. To truly enjoy Tiger King, we needed to root for Joe, at least, to some degree. 

To serve that end, the series depicts Joe as someone who neglected his animals out of sheer stupidity rather than malice, forgetting their needs as his ego grew. But this appears to be a romanticization, as producer Rick Kirkham (the guy who looks like he just stepped off the set of Westworld), claims that Joe Exotic was intentionally cruel to many of his animals, including his beloved tigers. 

Kirkham claimed that Joe would euthanize healthy tigers out of anger, and was unnecessarily cruel when feeding live animals to his big cats. Allegedly, Joe even shot a horse which he’d promised to care for, betraying the previous owner’s trust and feeding the remains to his tigers.

Amusingly, Kirkham also claims that Joe was terrified of his own tigers, choosing to be filmed sitting beside a blind white tiger and another heavily sedated by tranquilizers. While Tiger King told the story of an eccentric animal-lover who eventually lost his empathy, corrupted by fame and power, the reality seems far less compelling. 

It appears that the life of Joe Exotic, filtered through several layers of reality television, is even darker, and more depressing, than Netflix’s sordid depiction. 

The “Tiger King” mythos (which Kirkham had a huge hand in creating for Joe’s reality tv show), wasn’t just a glamorization; it was a total fabrication.