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Joe Exotic, for better or worse, is the show’s central character, and Tiger King sketches out a sparse biography that hints at, rather than elucidates, the forces that shaped him. The challenge seems to be that anything he says is stated in the service of inflating his own mystique, and the directors decline to press him or any of the other characters on the worst charges against them. There are some undeniable facts, such as how hard it must have been for Exotic to be a gay man in rural Oklahoma during the ’80s and ’90s. There’s also his history of releasing country songs he only lip-synchs to; his run for president in 2016 and for governor two years later; and his habit of filming virtually everything he does. There are a few private moments, too, including how he reacts after one of his employees is mauled by a tiger while at work. “I’m never gonna financially recover from this,” Maldonado-Passage sighs, while the rest of his employees try to tend to the victim’s severed arm. Hardest to endure is how he behaves at the funeral for his youngest husband, Travis, who accidentally shoots himself in the head. Dressed up in a dog collar, Exotic seizes the spotlight, singing, cracking jokes, and reminiscing fondly about his late partner’s testicles while Travis’s mother sobs.

Mostly, though, Exotic communes with tigers. He cuddles them while they’re riding shotgun in the front seat of his truck; he wrestles with them; he uses a steel hook to wrest newborn cubs from their mothers and then complains that the screaming babies are making too much noise. The visual impact of seeing humans and tigers so intimately connected is one of the defining qualities of Tiger King, and is also, the series suggests, why some people find tigers so appealing. There’s a taboo quality to the breach of natural laws separating humans and big cats that implies strength, virility, and power. No wonder, the show notes, so many male Tinder users have tiger selfies as avatars.

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Tiger King’s unified theory of tiger obsession falls short, however, when it reaches Carole Baskin, the owner of a Florida animal sanctuary devoted to big cats. This shortcoming might explain why the show takes such pains to portray her as a kook, and possibly even a murderer. Baskin is Exotic’s bête noire, a woman who has dedicated her career to trying to outlaw the breeding and personal ownership of exotic cats in the U.S. The show’s treatment of Baskin is where it indulges in its most egregious displays of false equivalence, as it tries to elevate her eccentricities to stand alongside those of Exotic and Antle. Baskin, Tiger King painstakingly lays out, is obsessed with animal print. The horror! Sometimes she wears flower crowns! She has an uncanny gift for search-engine optimization! She rides a bicycle! Her sanctuary relies heavily on unpaid volunteers! The show underscores all these facts, while making the most of the mysterious disappearance of Carole’s husband in 1997 and interviewing family members who seem convinced that she killed him. “There is absolutely no physical evidence at this time” implicating any one individual as a suspect, a police detective firmly and rather crushingly points out. Tiger King doesn’t care. It would much rather imply several times that she could have fed her husband’s corpse to tigers, had she been so inclined.