I am Team Carole Did Kill Don And Feed Him To The Cats And Also That “Disappearance” Line in The Power of Attorney Was Wild, and still she is better than Doc Antle.
It’s such Joe to transfer everything into his mom’s name and then act outraged when they came after his mom for the money. You did this! This is the direct result of your actions!
The credit Joe got for hiring felons and people no other options when in fact those were just the people willing to work for a trailer to sleep in and expired Walmart meat out of a trash bag.
Cats are cats. We have had Rory for 12 years and usually she is a bitch but fairly chill and then randomly she tries to kill one of us for the hell of it and bc she weighs nine pounds it’s okay but if she weighed 700 lbs we would have died several times. One day you’ll get bit by your adorable tiger you knew since she was a baby, and it will mean very little to her! It’s just a matter of time.
Also, guys, never agree to be on a reality tv show. Everyone thinks they will be the first person in history to be portrayed as lovable and relatable and it is just not gonna happen.
Everything about it was crazy, but I kept coming back to being amazed at how the Wal-Mart ammo salesman turned libertarian campaign manager seemed like the most thoughtful and put-together person on the show.
I think Jeff Lowe could five Doc Antle a run for his money. He was arrested for strangling his first wife and his comments about how his new wife needed to get right back in the gym after giving birth (not to mention his obsession with having a hot nanny) made me feel so bad for the women in his life.
I can't possible put these in any sort of order but top 5 wildest moments:
1. Serving pizzas made with expired meat from wal-mart
2. When Saff got his arm bit off and Joe immediately put on an EMT jacket before actually helping?? (Saff is trans which they do not mention in the doc at all)
3. Singing his own song and talking about balls while dressed as a priest at Travis's funeral, with his mother in the front row, then getting remarried 2 months later
4. John discovering DURING FILMING that James was an FBI informant
5. That extended shot of James on the water ski for no real reason
Honorable mention goes to finding a campaign manager in the gun department of wal-mart.
I am sure I am forgetting so many things because it was just non-stop but these are the ones that come to mind.
This is not any sort of fresh insight but the way this show exploited people like John (interviewing him shirtless was a choice, and why was that other guy interviewed in a bathtub?) was awful. Saff is trans and yet female pronouns and his deadname are used throughout. Joe's abuse of his young partners was just glossed over like it was another wacky thing about him. So while I don't think picking THE worst person in this show is useful, I do think AMONG the worst are the filmmakers themselves.
Seeing Eric (? Former employee with long blonde hair) grieving, looking at photos, obviously under the influence, asking “have you ever walked a tiger?” was one of the saddest minutes ever captured on film
I will never get over the zoo manager losing both his legs from ziplining. Or the woman whose boob job was planned for her, and who was grateful for it because it meant she got to rest.
Honestly, one of the wildest moments was post-trial when Carole's husband leaned in to the camera conspiratorially and revealed he likes to celebrate big victories with a fancy glass of champagne, as a treat. What a sweet, boring man. How did he possibly find himself in this world?
(For those who maybe felt like the documentary was exploitative and maybe a little immoral: I am your kind. We can talk about it below. It feels a little like an expose on child slavery that focuses the bulk of its attention on how wacky the slavers are. I don't feel better for watching it -- and I watched the whole thing.)
I hate to be a spoil sport, but does anyone else find the Carole hate distasteful? Like, all the memes are Carole, all the nastiness is about Carole. Doc Antle is some kind of sex cult leader, Joe Exotic probably set fire to his office, destroying all the video and killing the alligators, NOT TO MENTION making his mother the fall guy for his property, but Carole gets the hate? Not saying she's a saint, but the GLEE with the hate bothers me.
We're only two episodes into this absolute shit show, but the interview with Barbara "Bala" from Ames, Iowa was haunting because of the stuff that you know she wanted to say but couldn't or wouldn't. And also disturbed by how all of those super creepy Tiger men wanted doc's secret about how to form a harem.
Doc Antle definitely the lowkey worst, he is (was?) running a CULT. All his mystical bullshit and fake "doctor" thing. Ugh. But man, it's hard to believe all of these people are real.
I think there was a little too much plausible deniability in there that maybe Joe didn’t REALLY want Carole killed and Jeff set him up. If you read the thread also linked in here by the man who did the podcast on Joe, it’s very obvious that he was 100 percent on board with offing Carole. (I also think Carole is a shady lady who knows more about what happened to her husband than she is saying, but whatever crap he was involved in that meant he needed to fly small planes to Costa Rica under the radar may possibly have led to his demise, as opposed to her machinations.)
- "Don Lewis had a green thumb -- everything he touched turned to money" this is pretty light compared to everything else in this show, but that they used this phrase instead of Midas Touch really tickled me in a non-judgmental way
- The look on John Finlay's face when he first heard that the feds had been investigating Joe was absolutely precious and a source of light in a very dark and twisted tale
- Every music video
As far as the worst person, ESH except maybe John Finlay and the other victims of these horrible men, but yeah, Doc Antle is probably the most vile. The grooming and abuse are evil enough without the appropriation and being the outright worst cliche of "Polyam Dude With Ponytail"
The most normal and, in my opinion, likable person in the show turned out to be the dude with no legs. Everyone else in the show is just an awful human being.
I laughed my ass off at "the man is a walking chucky doll" tho
It's pretty wild that of everyone in the documentary, the one who comes across as the most levelheaded and trustworthy is the cocaine kingpin who inspired Scarface and admitted to standing by as his buddy chopped up a body.
The filmmakers were 100% with the men in this show. Carol, whose beaded headpiece doesn't help her, is not very likable, but there was no attempt to make her appear otherwise. The most telling line was when Carol appeared for the first interview and the producer/director (?) says "she's dressed perfectly!" They wanted her to appear as nutty as possible -- sensationalism combined with a healthy dose of misogyny. Plus, my sense is that despite the interview with the (lovely) woman who was 'given' breast implants the filmmakers also wanted to know his secret.
I watched with some college friends over Watch Party because we're Okies. That's when we realized we all had nebulous connections to people in the doc; Joe Exotic used to come into Staples where my friend worked to print campaign materials, the campaign manager went to our liberal arts college, and even the town I went to high school in got a shout-out. It felt very surreal because we've known about Joe for awhile. Crazy things were always happening at the zoo and people suspected something bad when his husband killed himself. It's weird but I definitely feel like Joe was the ...least worst? I at least have more understanding for him. But Doc 💯 the worst and Jeff not far behind.
1. It was a fun documentary, but I came away from it incredibly disappointed because they had so much opportunity to shed light on wild animal abuse and they didn't. The scene where Joe took the tiger cub from its mother the moment it was born? Fucking horrific. They never touched on how awful and evil cub breeding and cub petting is because they wanted Carole and Joe to be seen as "equally bad" for the narrative, but it's so, so clear that Joe is a fucked up animal abuser.
2. My boyfriend went to college in rural Ohio and when it got to the part about the guy who let all his wild animals loose in Ohio he yelled "THAT'S why I had to be scared of being eaten by a lion on campus for a YEAR??" The Midwest is wild.
I went to high school with Travis. We weren’t friends but had classes together and some mutual friends. One time in theater we did an improv skit together and he did very well. He was a very typical Southern California skater/stoner kid but also uncommonly nice. I already knew what had happened to him, but I hadn’t heard just how abusive and exploitative the situation was and it was extremely sad to see.
I know people who have been to Carole's rescue and they said it was well run and very nice. I am very miffed that she is lumped with the others when she does not breed the animals, does not allow posing pictures, and the people that work there are free to leave and not induced to stay with cult mind games and drug use. Carole found herself a loving husband, is doing what she is passionate about without hurting her volunteers/employees, and seems pretty darn content with life - fully on Team Carole.
1. In the first ep, when someone says all exotic animal people are weird, but monkey people are just nerds and the big cat folks are the real sociopaths. I want to know all the negative stereotypes exotic animal people have about each other. Are bird people cheap? Are elephant guys bad drivers?
2. Noticing that Joe took a time during his gubernatorial campaign to get a neck tattoo of his new child groom's name. That's what love looks like.
3. I sincerely appreciated Carole's insight that a lot of sexual predators are mixed up in this exotic animal stuff because it's a way to lure young people into their orbit.
4. Noticing how working/volunteering at any of these places is more or less an MLM.
5. Any scene with the sheriff or the federal prosecutor, for a dose of sanity.
Every time I thought I had a handle on how wild and absurd EVERYTHING was, something else happened and threw me for a loop! A sex cult! A disappeared multimillionaire husband! A coercive throuple! Country diss tracks! I googled ahead and knew Travis died “in a gun accident while the zoo was open” and I was like, woof, that sounds dramatic, and THEN it was a suicide that was sort of caught on CCTV? I was NOT prepared for that, I was not prepared for anything that happened in episodes 2-7.
I completely agree with all the commenters defending Carole. The documentary draws a clear equivalence between Carole and Joe, Doc, Jeff etc., who are all OBVIOUSLY worse people! Sure, Don's death is suspicious, but Occam's Razor people, she probably had nothing to do with it. Her real crime in the eyes of the American public is being annoying. The reaction to the show reveals that Americans will forgive a lot -- misogyny, animal abuse, coercion -- but not sanctimony.
1. Using the expired meat on the pizzas they fed to paying customers.
2. The documentary didn't mention that Don's assistant actually was stealing from him and was sued just before the disappearance. Makes more sense why the POAs were changed out of her name and I'm less inclined to believe her view of Carole.
3. That there weren't MORE gun related injuries with the way they all wildly swung around loaded weapons and shot things while presumably high.
4. Doc Antle's voice/behavior changing SO MUCH when the cameras were rolling. Truly a practiced conman.
5. That Joe Exotic managed to win 19% of the vote! Also his campaign videos were gold.
Someone tweeted that Lisa Kudrow’s whole career has been an extended audition for the role of Carole Baskin and I can’t get it out of my head?? She would be PERFECT
Just so much WTF when Carole is talking about how Joe keeps his tigers in cages and THANK GOD she is there for the tigers...and the cameraman pans over her tigers, also in cages.
And did anyone marvel at how much the Carole lookalike really looked like Carole in that video?
Also I asked a friend of mine if he'd seen the show and he said, and I quote, "Murder docs aren't really my thing." Calling Tiger King a murder doc is akin to calling Les Miserables a book about sewers, my good dude.
I actually think the doc WAY underplayed the role drugs played in all of this? Like, it was clear it was happening, I kept waiting for an episode to overtly say "oh, and all these people were on so, so many drugs!" but they didn't. I think Joe used drugs as a manipulation tool even more than they let on, including with his poor employees that he treated just like expired wal-mart meat.
I had no idea that there are more than double the amount of tigers in captivity than in the wild. It also felt weird that the filmmakers stuck that in at the very end because that clearly wasn't the point of the series at all and it felt shoehorned in at the end...although now that I think about it, that seems pretty fitting. The tigers felt like the eventual last priority to all the main "characters" involved, too.
i had listened to the podcast on the subject before the doc came out, so getting through episode three and announcing “we havent even gotten to the murder for hire” to my house was a kind of christmas.
I want a documentary about this documentary. How did they get so much access (My strong hunch: these greedy dipshits would talk about anything for a crisp hundo bill) to these con artists? How did they balance the perspectives and keep everyone talking? DId they start the doc before Joe was arrested? How guilty/ashamed of themselves do they feel now?
Okay, I am admittedly a little sensitive to animal abuse themes, so i I haven’t watched it and only read a lot about the series, but what the fuck? The filmmakers have said they set out to make the “blackfish of the roadside zoo industry” (in other words, a heavy doc that alerted people to issues, and in this case, one that sparked real change at sea world) and they felt like Netflix leaned into sensationalizing the characters for entertainment value. I get that, i get reality tv and docuseries about weirdos, i love real-life-Christopher-guest vibes, but it sounds like this is about a really seriously gross corner of human behavior treated with some amount of levity because of the people in it and it’s not sitting well with me. I don’t want to find joy in an animal abuser, no matter what. And Carole does seem totally insane (have you guys volunteered or worked in rescue at any level? You get some wild characters) but her organization IS a sanctuary, so i am hating seeing her villanized and memed to death because even if she’s a criminal she seems to be on the right side for the tigers, at least. I don’t know. Please help me feel less bad, if that sounds possible.
1) Joe Exotic getting into his car and saying, "My favorite thing to do is drive around and sing along to myself" then proceeding to "sing along to himself" completely off-key and maybe also not knowing the words really?
2) Doc Antle renaming those poor young women to very clearly have what he thinks are "exotic" names but he is so unimaginative and DUMB that the one woman's name is just....China. A real "first thought, best thought" kinda guy.
3) Wal-mart meat on the pizza.
3a) "Pizzaria" - Granted, so many places across the US use this misspelling of pizzeria, but boy oh boy did it make me chuckle.
4) Carole's ex-husbands family. I mean... the hair, the house, the outfits, the everything.
5) Joe's gift shop announcement a la "Imm'on tell you cuz you're gonna hear about it"
IMO the hands-down most fucked up person is Jeff Lowe!
So I haven't watched it but I an familiar with the case through podcasts and honestly it sounds like the doc makes did Carole Baskin real dirty here, especially with the insinuation she murdered her much older, abusive husband
I don't think Carole killed her husband, but I think she knows what happened. I also think her husband wanted it to seem like she'd killed him (the note about her apparently threatening him etc).
I am Team Carole Did Kill Don And Feed Him To The Cats And Also That “Disappearance” Line in The Power of Attorney Was Wild, and still she is better than Doc Antle.
Also, the fact that there a million people in this series and none of them have ever heard of bisexuality.
It’s such Joe to transfer everything into his mom’s name and then act outraged when they came after his mom for the money. You did this! This is the direct result of your actions!
The credit Joe got for hiring felons and people no other options when in fact those were just the people willing to work for a trailer to sleep in and expired Walmart meat out of a trash bag.
I want Dillon Passage to have a good life.
when Jeff said "a little pussy can get you a lot of pussy" I truly truly worried I could never have sex again
Cats are cats. We have had Rory for 12 years and usually she is a bitch but fairly chill and then randomly she tries to kill one of us for the hell of it and bc she weighs nine pounds it’s okay but if she weighed 700 lbs we would have died several times. One day you’ll get bit by your adorable tiger you knew since she was a baby, and it will mean very little to her! It’s just a matter of time.
Also WHO IN RURAL OKLAHOMA could drop a cool $625 to play with baby tigers? Repeatedly? Enough to keep the adults in expired meat and cow legs?
Also, guys, never agree to be on a reality tv show. Everyone thinks they will be the first person in history to be portrayed as lovable and relatable and it is just not gonna happen.
Everything about it was crazy, but I kept coming back to being amazed at how the Wal-Mart ammo salesman turned libertarian campaign manager seemed like the most thoughtful and put-together person on the show.
I think Jeff Lowe could five Doc Antle a run for his money. He was arrested for strangling his first wife and his comments about how his new wife needed to get right back in the gym after giving birth (not to mention his obsession with having a hot nanny) made me feel so bad for the women in his life.
I can't possible put these in any sort of order but top 5 wildest moments:
1. Serving pizzas made with expired meat from wal-mart
2. When Saff got his arm bit off and Joe immediately put on an EMT jacket before actually helping?? (Saff is trans which they do not mention in the doc at all)
3. Singing his own song and talking about balls while dressed as a priest at Travis's funeral, with his mother in the front row, then getting remarried 2 months later
4. John discovering DURING FILMING that James was an FBI informant
5. That extended shot of James on the water ski for no real reason
Honorable mention goes to finding a campaign manager in the gun department of wal-mart.
I am sure I am forgetting so many things because it was just non-stop but these are the ones that come to mind.
This is not any sort of fresh insight but the way this show exploited people like John (interviewing him shirtless was a choice, and why was that other guy interviewed in a bathtub?) was awful. Saff is trans and yet female pronouns and his deadname are used throughout. Joe's abuse of his young partners was just glossed over like it was another wacky thing about him. So while I don't think picking THE worst person in this show is useful, I do think AMONG the worst are the filmmakers themselves.
Seeing Eric (? Former employee with long blonde hair) grieving, looking at photos, obviously under the influence, asking “have you ever walked a tiger?” was one of the saddest minutes ever captured on film
I will never get over the zoo manager losing both his legs from ziplining. Or the woman whose boob job was planned for her, and who was grateful for it because it meant she got to rest.
After watching this my wife had a work stress dream but her job was organizing tigers in excel.
Honestly, one of the wildest moments was post-trial when Carole's husband leaned in to the camera conspiratorially and revealed he likes to celebrate big victories with a fancy glass of champagne, as a treat. What a sweet, boring man. How did he possibly find himself in this world?
(For those who maybe felt like the documentary was exploitative and maybe a little immoral: I am your kind. We can talk about it below. It feels a little like an expose on child slavery that focuses the bulk of its attention on how wacky the slavers are. I don't feel better for watching it -- and I watched the whole thing.)
I hate to be a spoil sport, but does anyone else find the Carole hate distasteful? Like, all the memes are Carole, all the nastiness is about Carole. Doc Antle is some kind of sex cult leader, Joe Exotic probably set fire to his office, destroying all the video and killing the alligators, NOT TO MENTION making his mother the fall guy for his property, but Carole gets the hate? Not saying she's a saint, but the GLEE with the hate bothers me.
We're only two episodes into this absolute shit show, but the interview with Barbara "Bala" from Ames, Iowa was haunting because of the stuff that you know she wanted to say but couldn't or wouldn't. And also disturbed by how all of those super creepy Tiger men wanted doc's secret about how to form a harem.
Doc Antle definitely the lowkey worst, he is (was?) running a CULT. All his mystical bullshit and fake "doctor" thing. Ugh. But man, it's hard to believe all of these people are real.
Idk if anyone has said this yet but the zoo pizza shop Joe started was called ZOOTERS
I think there was a little too much plausible deniability in there that maybe Joe didn’t REALLY want Carole killed and Jeff set him up. If you read the thread also linked in here by the man who did the podcast on Joe, it’s very obvious that he was 100 percent on board with offing Carole. (I also think Carole is a shady lady who knows more about what happened to her husband than she is saying, but whatever crap he was involved in that meant he needed to fly small planes to Costa Rica under the radar may possibly have led to his demise, as opposed to her machinations.)
I felt so bad for Josh the campaign manager until he declared he’s a hard core libertarian.
Favorite moments
- "Don Lewis had a green thumb -- everything he touched turned to money" this is pretty light compared to everything else in this show, but that they used this phrase instead of Midas Touch really tickled me in a non-judgmental way
- The look on John Finlay's face when he first heard that the feds had been investigating Joe was absolutely precious and a source of light in a very dark and twisted tale
- Every music video
As far as the worst person, ESH except maybe John Finlay and the other victims of these horrible men, but yeah, Doc Antle is probably the most vile. The grooming and abuse are evil enough without the appropriation and being the outright worst cliche of "Polyam Dude With Ponytail"
As a public librarian I have to say that almost everyone in this series would be a NIGHTMARE PATRON
The most normal and, in my opinion, likable person in the show turned out to be the dude with no legs. Everyone else in the show is just an awful human being.
I laughed my ass off at "the man is a walking chucky doll" tho
It's pretty wild that of everyone in the documentary, the one who comes across as the most levelheaded and trustworthy is the cocaine kingpin who inspired Scarface and admitted to standing by as his buddy chopped up a body.
The filmmakers were 100% with the men in this show. Carol, whose beaded headpiece doesn't help her, is not very likable, but there was no attempt to make her appear otherwise. The most telling line was when Carol appeared for the first interview and the producer/director (?) says "she's dressed perfectly!" They wanted her to appear as nutty as possible -- sensationalism combined with a healthy dose of misogyny. Plus, my sense is that despite the interview with the (lovely) woman who was 'given' breast implants the filmmakers also wanted to know his secret.
I watched with some college friends over Watch Party because we're Okies. That's when we realized we all had nebulous connections to people in the doc; Joe Exotic used to come into Staples where my friend worked to print campaign materials, the campaign manager went to our liberal arts college, and even the town I went to high school in got a shout-out. It felt very surreal because we've known about Joe for awhile. Crazy things were always happening at the zoo and people suspected something bad when his husband killed himself. It's weird but I definitely feel like Joe was the ...least worst? I at least have more understanding for him. But Doc 💯 the worst and Jeff not far behind.
1. It was a fun documentary, but I came away from it incredibly disappointed because they had so much opportunity to shed light on wild animal abuse and they didn't. The scene where Joe took the tiger cub from its mother the moment it was born? Fucking horrific. They never touched on how awful and evil cub breeding and cub petting is because they wanted Carole and Joe to be seen as "equally bad" for the narrative, but it's so, so clear that Joe is a fucked up animal abuser.
2. My boyfriend went to college in rural Ohio and when it got to the part about the guy who let all his wild animals loose in Ohio he yelled "THAT'S why I had to be scared of being eaten by a lion on campus for a YEAR??" The Midwest is wild.
Oh and Saff and zip-line guy are the only two seemingly redeemable humans in this whole thing. "I had to go buy pants!" was such an endearing line.
Oh ALSO important note: the show fucked up about this but Saff is a trans man and uses he/him pronouns
I went to high school with Travis. We weren’t friends but had classes together and some mutual friends. One time in theater we did an improv skit together and he did very well. He was a very typical Southern California skater/stoner kid but also uncommonly nice. I already knew what had happened to him, but I hadn’t heard just how abusive and exploitative the situation was and it was extremely sad to see.
I know people who have been to Carole's rescue and they said it was well run and very nice. I am very miffed that she is lumped with the others when she does not breed the animals, does not allow posing pictures, and the people that work there are free to leave and not induced to stay with cult mind games and drug use. Carole found herself a loving husband, is doing what she is passionate about without hurting her volunteers/employees, and seems pretty darn content with life - fully on Team Carole.
Top 5:
1. In the first ep, when someone says all exotic animal people are weird, but monkey people are just nerds and the big cat folks are the real sociopaths. I want to know all the negative stereotypes exotic animal people have about each other. Are bird people cheap? Are elephant guys bad drivers?
2. Noticing that Joe took a time during his gubernatorial campaign to get a neck tattoo of his new child groom's name. That's what love looks like.
3. I sincerely appreciated Carole's insight that a lot of sexual predators are mixed up in this exotic animal stuff because it's a way to lure young people into their orbit.
4. Noticing how working/volunteering at any of these places is more or less an MLM.
5. Any scene with the sheriff or the federal prosecutor, for a dose of sanity.
Every time I thought I had a handle on how wild and absurd EVERYTHING was, something else happened and threw me for a loop! A sex cult! A disappeared multimillionaire husband! A coercive throuple! Country diss tracks! I googled ahead and knew Travis died “in a gun accident while the zoo was open” and I was like, woof, that sounds dramatic, and THEN it was a suicide that was sort of caught on CCTV? I was NOT prepared for that, I was not prepared for anything that happened in episodes 2-7.
I completely agree with all the commenters defending Carole. The documentary draws a clear equivalence between Carole and Joe, Doc, Jeff etc., who are all OBVIOUSLY worse people! Sure, Don's death is suspicious, but Occam's Razor people, she probably had nothing to do with it. Her real crime in the eyes of the American public is being annoying. The reaction to the show reveals that Americans will forgive a lot -- misogyny, animal abuse, coercion -- but not sanctimony.
1. Using the expired meat on the pizzas they fed to paying customers.
2. The documentary didn't mention that Don's assistant actually was stealing from him and was sued just before the disappearance. Makes more sense why the POAs were changed out of her name and I'm less inclined to believe her view of Carole.
3. That there weren't MORE gun related injuries with the way they all wildly swung around loaded weapons and shot things while presumably high.
4. Doc Antle's voice/behavior changing SO MUCH when the cameras were rolling. Truly a practiced conman.
5. That Joe Exotic managed to win 19% of the vote! Also his campaign videos were gold.
Someone tweeted that Lisa Kudrow’s whole career has been an extended audition for the role of Carole Baskin and I can’t get it out of my head?? She would be PERFECT
Just so much WTF when Carole is talking about how Joe keeps his tigers in cages and THANK GOD she is there for the tigers...and the cameraman pans over her tigers, also in cages.
And did anyone marvel at how much the Carole lookalike really looked like Carole in that video?
Also I asked a friend of mine if he'd seen the show and he said, and I quote, "Murder docs aren't really my thing." Calling Tiger King a murder doc is akin to calling Les Miserables a book about sewers, my good dude.
I actually think the doc WAY underplayed the role drugs played in all of this? Like, it was clear it was happening, I kept waiting for an episode to overtly say "oh, and all these people were on so, so many drugs!" but they didn't. I think Joe used drugs as a manipulation tool even more than they let on, including with his poor employees that he treated just like expired wal-mart meat.
I had no idea that there are more than double the amount of tigers in captivity than in the wild. It also felt weird that the filmmakers stuck that in at the very end because that clearly wasn't the point of the series at all and it felt shoehorned in at the end...although now that I think about it, that seems pretty fitting. The tigers felt like the eventual last priority to all the main "characters" involved, too.
i had listened to the podcast on the subject before the doc came out, so getting through episode three and announcing “we havent even gotten to the murder for hire” to my house was a kind of christmas.
I want a documentary about this documentary. How did they get so much access (My strong hunch: these greedy dipshits would talk about anything for a crisp hundo bill) to these con artists? How did they balance the perspectives and keep everyone talking? DId they start the doc before Joe was arrested? How guilty/ashamed of themselves do they feel now?
Okay, I am admittedly a little sensitive to animal abuse themes, so i I haven’t watched it and only read a lot about the series, but what the fuck? The filmmakers have said they set out to make the “blackfish of the roadside zoo industry” (in other words, a heavy doc that alerted people to issues, and in this case, one that sparked real change at sea world) and they felt like Netflix leaned into sensationalizing the characters for entertainment value. I get that, i get reality tv and docuseries about weirdos, i love real-life-Christopher-guest vibes, but it sounds like this is about a really seriously gross corner of human behavior treated with some amount of levity because of the people in it and it’s not sitting well with me. I don’t want to find joy in an animal abuser, no matter what. And Carole does seem totally insane (have you guys volunteered or worked in rescue at any level? You get some wild characters) but her organization IS a sanctuary, so i am hating seeing her villanized and memed to death because even if she’s a criminal she seems to be on the right side for the tigers, at least. I don’t know. Please help me feel less bad, if that sounds possible.
1) Joe Exotic getting into his car and saying, "My favorite thing to do is drive around and sing along to myself" then proceeding to "sing along to himself" completely off-key and maybe also not knowing the words really?
2) Doc Antle renaming those poor young women to very clearly have what he thinks are "exotic" names but he is so unimaginative and DUMB that the one woman's name is just....China. A real "first thought, best thought" kinda guy.
3) Wal-mart meat on the pizza.
3a) "Pizzaria" - Granted, so many places across the US use this misspelling of pizzeria, but boy oh boy did it make me chuckle.
4) Carole's ex-husbands family. I mean... the hair, the house, the outfits, the everything.
5) Joe's gift shop announcement a la "Imm'on tell you cuz you're gonna hear about it"
IMO the hands-down most fucked up person is Jeff Lowe!
So I haven't watched it but I an familiar with the case through podcasts and honestly it sounds like the doc makes did Carole Baskin real dirty here, especially with the insinuation she murdered her much older, abusive husband
I don't think Carole killed her husband, but I think she knows what happened. I also think her husband wanted it to seem like she'd killed him (the note about her apparently threatening him etc).