There are a lot of things that bother me about this show. It's not bad, it's definitely entertaining, but I feel like a lot of actually important things in this show are overlooked or just blatantly ignored.
The creators of this show set out to highlight the abuse of these tigers but ultimately fail by focusing on the people who keeps these animals locked up. First of all, I get it, everything happening is insane and can't be ignored either. Yet the only moment they actually seem to talk about these tigers is in the last 10 seconds of this almost 6 hours long show. They also completely fail to mention how you can take action to actually improve the life of these animals and how to prevent more tigers from ending up in these horrible places. Secondly; the insane praise many on the internet seem to have for Joe exotic makes me genuinely nauseous. Joe abuses not only animals but mentally abuses people, even to the point of one of them taking their own life. Yet he comes out of this like some kind of anti-hero? Thirdly, the villainization of Carole Baskin is ridiculous. She's no angel, nobody in this show is, but the way this is cut makes the only person in this whole shit show who is actually trying to help these tigers look like the worst.
I'm not telling people to not watch this as it's not a bad show. Just try not to get swept up in the hype of it all and try maybe to look into things that this show fails to mention. Here's a good YouTube video about it in case anyone cares: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dX8HwbqRTOI
Review by TriseultBlockedParent2020-04-05T12:07:48Z
It's definitely a batshit-crazy story for our times, and I enjoyed the mad ride. However, the producers really had an agenda going into this, and I find myself resentful of their overall editorial approach. A few points:
Joe Exotic is a bad guy. He's charismatic and fascinating to watch, but the show does a lot to gloss over his actions. The series does its best to gloss over what he did and let him express his own side of the story, but come on. The guy was being harassed by Carole Baskin for legitimate reasons (exploiting and breeding exotic animals) and reacted in the most insane way. This is a guy who manipulated straight guys into marrying him in exchange for a steady supply of drugs.
The series does a huge disservice to Carole Baskin. Is she insane? Hell yeah she is. But crazy isn't a reason to send someone to prison. Yeah, she's as obsessed with big cats as the rest of the cast of crazies, but the huge difference is that she RESCUES exploited animals. She doesn't breed them. She doesn't sell them for profit. That the big takeaway of the series is "Well, she is as insane as the rest of them" really does a huge disservice to a significant difference between Baskin and the exotic pet breeders.
The series really overplays the "Baskin killed her husband" angle to prop up Joe Exotic and for the shock of it. It presents a lot of "facts" as-is to support this without exploring the arguments against them. For instance, Don's Power of Attorney included the activation clause for disappearance because Don Baskin was legitimately concerned he might disappear without a trace in Costa Rica.
So. A cool story, overall, and a crazy cast of characters, but it's unfortunate that people are taking this series as definitive documentary truth when it's a well-spun fiction with amplified craziness for the sake of shock value.