Tiger King 2 offers more proof that crazy is relative

Season 1 is a perfect statement about the weird world we live in. What else can Season 2 tell us?

by Justin Choo

The most surprising takeaway about Tiger King when it first dropped, was in learning that tall tales have nothing on real life.

Joe Exotic certainly lives up to his billing as the titular monarch and you can’t complain about what you’re getting after clicking on that Netflix entry – you’ve seen the name, yet you persisted. The flamboyant and eccentric ‘Tiger King’ was the poster child for a series that promised you a world packed with dubious people doing dubious things in dubious places.

Season 1 was released amid a pandemic; as if knowingly to toy with our untethered sense of disbelief at what reality has become. The joke’s on us because it’s merely a window to a wider world; one that we have been shielded from by our daily routines. One season is quite a lot to take in, how would Season 2 fare? how much of this can you take? Perhaps it’s in keeping with our fatigue at the current situation, albeit unironically.

Joe retreats from the limelight this time around, though not of his violition. Instead, it’s down to the rest of the cast, as well as a few fresh faces, to attempt to keep the train crash going. Carole Baskin, Joe’s arch-nemesis from Season 1, gets her share of attention for all the wrong reasons as the cameras fix their lenses on the allegations behind her husband’s mysterious disappearance. Unsurprisingly, Carole will also be involved in an off-camera (as opposed to real life) legal tussle with Netflix over the use of footage of her and her Big Cat Rescue Sanctuary – it’s the show beyond the show that sells.

Nonetheless, the most unsurprising thing about a train wreck is that you never want to look away. In this case, it’s hard to imagine how the show can carry on without the antagonism between Carole and Joe, yet you probably feel that you have to see this through.

Tiger King Season 2 is now screening on Netflix.