The Tiger King in Quarantine: On That New Episode
by Ian Carlos Crawford
The Tiger King’s newly released 8th Episode is totally a messy cash grab but also totally worth the viewing.
The documentary was a well-shot, tense mess itself. So it tracks that a “where are they now” type episode would be equally messy. What’s missing is the tension and the crazy — aka Carole Baskins and Joe Exotic.
Joe McHale hosting the whole thing adds an extra level of bananas to the whole thing. Did some of these folks even realize he was famous? The whole thing felt like a lazy episode of McHale’s early 2000s show The Soup. While Joel McHale is incredibly handsome, tall, and shitty — his tone doesn’t quite translate here? The show itself is ridiculous enough, we didn’t need the one-liners to tell us how absurd it all was. Show not tell, Netflix!
Also, they for sure just could have waited until this was all over and done a better produced, better thought-out epilogue to the show. What we loved was how often the show would have a 40 minute info dump that had us gay gasping after every single bit of new info. The moment you thought you were getting bored with the series — boom, a reveal that both Joe Exotic’s husbands were straight. Or we get that clip of Carole Baskin saying that if you wanted to have a tiger eat someone you’d cover him in sardine oil not cologne because duh not that she did that with her husband or anything. Tiger King was like a ham-fisted novela my dearly departed grandma Panchy would’ve watched on Telemundo only this shit is real!
These brief interviews all felt like nothing too new. For sure, there was some new info but none of the interviews had me clutching my pearls, none of it could compare to Joe talking about his dead husband’s balls at his funeral. But if you’ve spent the almost 7 full hours with the original series, what’d 40 more minutes of handsome Joel McHale being shitty while interviewing a few of the folks from the documentary? I mean, we’re all in quarantine it’s not like we have anything better to do.
The cool cats and kittens assembled for this reunion, via Skype calls, are the long blonde haired Erik Cowie (who could have been 8 different characters put into one guy for all I remember), Jeff and Lauren Lowe (who are also clearly bad), John Reinke (the guy memorable for being one of the only seemingly good people on the show who has the Ed Hardy-lookin’ fake legs), Saff Saffery (the trans man who had his arm bitten off and went back to work almost immediately), Josh Dial (Joe’s campaign manager who deserved better), John Finlay (Joe’s toothless, shirtless husband number 1), and Robert Kirkham (the reality show producer who opens the show and lost all his footage in a fire at the end of the series).
I felt like I’d learned more reading Robert Moor’s Twitter thread about the show than I did in this reunion. Robert Moor worked on the podcast that the show came from — and he was where I learned John Finlay got new pearly whites, that Carole Baskin’s boyfriend after Don Lewis field a restraining order against her, and how Joe Exotic used to be a cop.
But in this reunion, we get more facetime from the side characters which like, sure fine whatever. The biggest throughline is that basically everyone involved knew Joe Exotic treated his animals poorly. There was no cover-up there — everyone knew about it. They all spoke openly and honestly about it.
Another thing is, when you’re watching the show you feel Joe was set up — almost none of the folks on this reunion felt that way. Everyone knew he wanted to kill Carole. As to if Jeff should also be in jail, well, that seems up for debate.
Erik Cowie gives us the first big reveal that not all the tigers put down were sick at all. Which is somewhat backed up by the animal abuse allegations made by…well…literally everyone else on the reunion. Not that everyone here is a credible witness but ya know.
Jeff and Lauren Lowe, lookin’ like villains from an extremely New Jersey mob movie, discuss their new hot nanny and say it’s a “complete crock of shit” to think Joe was set up. But they both also think Carole for sure killed her husband. We agree on one thing, Mr. and Mrs. Lowe! Joe McHale makes a few digs at Jeff Lowe’s WWE wrestling style and it’s all very awkward.
We quickly move onto John Reinke who feels like the realist on this panel of cartoon characters. He informs the audience he was always more committed to the animals than Joe. He also drops a not-so-surprising piece of new info that Jeff Lowe and Joe’s final husband Dillon got into a 15 minute long fist fight once. That’s an incredibly long fist fight! John also said he’d like Matthew McConaughey to play him in a movie. I mean, sure!
We then get to Saff, who is either the chilliest person alive or ….I don’t know, dude. Saff was notable for having one of the biggest moments early on in the show. Saff had his god damned arm bitten off by a tiger and, even though it could’ve been surgically put back on with 2 years of surgeries, he decided to have it just fully cut off. He is one step away from a no regrets tattoo here! Saff talks about being misgendered on the show and says it bothered other folks more than it bothered him. Saff also seems to be incredibly rational when discussing Joe — he says Joe did a lot of bad stuff but he doesn’t want Joe to die in jail.
Joshua Dial, Joe Exotic’s campaign manager who watched Travis kill himself, is the character I found the most sympathy for. He found the series to be fair and balanced — saying Joe was always batshit crazy. “I once saw a guy get his finger bit off by a gear outside my window,” is a bananas tidbit he shares about working on the compound that never made it into the series which begs the question exactly how many appendages were bitten off at this zoo on a daily basis? Dial also talks about the look in Travis’s eyes when he shot himself, which is pretty heartbreaking but made awkward by the fact that he’s talking to freakin’ Joel McHale about it!
Joe’s more chill husband, John Finlay, is up next — with his new teeth and a shirt. His interview is pretty compelling if only because he looks incredibly upset the entire time. I had wondered if the show edited how blue his eyes were but even in this Skype chat they were incredibly blue. He’s almost unrecognizable. His only big reveal is that there were apparently a lot of people hooking up at the zoo.
Robert Kirkham, the reality show producer, is the final interview and his biggest reveal is that once a woman brought her sick horse to Joe Exotic and he hugged her and told her he’d take care of the zoo only to shoot and kill the horse as soon as she left to use it as tiger meat.
“There is no job offer I’ll turn down,” Joel McHale says at the end of the whole thing. It’s strange and weird and really adds nothing new to the story but I still recommend watching it for all the weird stories and tidbits they all drop. I am strongly in camp Carole killed her husband and that Joe was set up but with asterisk with both. I think Carole didn’t kill her husband herself, maybe it was a hired hit or something and that Joe Exotic was set up but only in the way that everyone who went along always had the intention of throwing him under the bus with all the things he was saying. I think Joe belongs in jail but so do Carole and Jeff.
But that’s what makes the show so compelling, right? There is so much info, yet it’s almost impossible to know for a fact who was telling the truth and what really happened.
Stay safe during quarantine and while you’re stuck in home you might as well pop on this slightly boring coda to Tiger King.
About the Author:
Ian Carlos Crawford grew up in southern New Jersey and, like most people from NJ, he graduated from Rutgers University. He then graduated from New School with an MFA in nonfiction writing. His writing has appeared on sites like Geeks Out, BuzzFeed, NewNowNext, and other random corners of the internet. He currently co-hosts a podcast about his favorite thing, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, called Slayerfest 98 and is shopping around his fiction manuscript. Follow him on Twitter @ianxcarlos!
