Joe Exotic Presidential Candidate 2016 vs. That B***h Carole Baskin - the viral battle of the century

By Daisy Lacey, MA Comparative Literatures and Culture

Here is an account about my descent into this striped, hillbilly madness: the unravelling of two feline empires brought about by corruption and countless illegalities, to be deemed best in the U.S.A.

March 20th 2020 - Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness (2020) first aired on Netflix.

March 20th 2020 - The world is fighting a pandemic, by introducing questionably drastic measures to prevent the spread of the virus.

March 28th 2020 - the world was in flux, the United Kingdom was given a lecture by BoJo to stop indoors for our health and safety - an argument for another day - and 16 million Netflix accounts had been created in the first three months of the year. So many that Netflix had to meet demand by slowing down the speed at which shows are delivered in the EU for fear the internet would break - without the aid of a Kardashian.

'Am I really going to waste roughly 7 hours of my life watching this?' Believe me I did

March 28th 2020 - I received four messages from four different people asking if I was watching ‘the brand new must see show on Netflix called Tiger King’. I said I hadn’t watched anything on there for ages, looked up the trailer for the show, and couldn’t finish watching it.

The final point that made me cave into this cult was ‘you should definitely watch it… it’s about insane redneck dodgy zookeepers plotting to kill each other… And it features lots of cats of various sizes’. I caved into joining this pseudo-religious TV cult of Lions and Tigers on Netflix, and Oh My! I was watching this series.

So how did a show about two ‘Big Cat Zookeepers’ turn into a wonderfully childish battle, to the point where Oklahoma zookeeper Joe Exotic, is in jail for conspiring and plotting to kill his Florida rival Carole Baskin - that b***h is optional for the purposes of this article.

Admittedly my cynicism whilst watching the show remained at a rather high level. I kept thinking to myself 'why is this show so popular? Am I really going to waste roughly 7 hours of my life watching it?' And believe me I did.

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The producer behind this tragicomedy is the same chap behind another Netflix hit Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened (2019) and The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann (2019) - both were hits on Netflix. He knows what viewers want from a documentary: nowadays, you can tell the popularity of a documentary by the amount of memes created around the show rather than checking Rotten Tomatoes. When I kept seeing my phone flooded with floral crowns, mullets, animal prints and some unusually questionable wedding photos, I knew that Chris Smith had struck gold once again.

I only really felt the show hooked me in on the 3rd episode when it ended on the cliffhanger about Carole Baskin’s missing husband. This is when I found myself resembling the Bill Hader doing dateline meme, with my popcorn and curiosity fully aroused.

My personal highlights of the show were snippets into Joe Exotic’s country music career: who doesn’t love a terrible lip sync? The wedding photos of Carole and her third husband: my future husband will also sport a collar, lead and Fred Flintstone ensemble for our wedding.

I caved into joining this pseudo-religious TV cult of Lions and Tigers on Netflix, and Oh My!

There is also the unusual way Joe procures straight young men through his grooming; offering them meth and convincing them they are bisexual because of their choices in pornography. There’s the wine and cheese nights ‘that b***h’ has with her third husband to celebrate Joe Exotic’s imprisonment. But my highlight is Joe Exotic condoms, promoting his candidacy as US President, and the response from his bemused campaign manager.

All I will say about this show is to not feel compelled to watch it, especially if you do not like the thought of animals being mistreated, as that was one key aspect I did struggle with. It is very hard to say much about this show without giving everything away to those who are curious about it.

The best summary I got about this show from a friend of mine: ‘by the time an episode was finished I would shout to myself WTF just happened!?’ This is by far the best summary of the mini-series. Part of me also hopes that the lockdown is extended to Halloween: the thought of Joe Exotics and Carole Baskins getting drunk in a nightclub leaves me cold.

If you want to descend into this world of redneck zoo-keeping madness, enriched with murder plots, big cats, Costa Rica and diets of sardine oil and Walmart’s finest processed meat recovered from a skip dive... This show is definitely for you.

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If the curiosity becomes unbearable, just watch it, even if you are like me, a cat lover, then maybe you can give it a whirl. This really is a case of a series that you can’t explain to anybody who hasn’t watched it, nor do you want to; it is the definition of a one off, much like the battle of the unlikeable characters of the show.

Featured: IMDb / Netflix

Where do you stand in the viral battle of Carole Baskin vs. Joe Exotic?