Not boring, but completely unnecessary: ​​the second season of "Tiger King" pales in comparison to the previous one

The first season of the Netflix documentary series has become a huge hit sponsored by Corona.

And yet, this is no reason to invest in the second season of "Tiger King," which looks mostly like another cynical victory round of Netflix at the expense of Joe Exotic's mesmerizing and tragic personality

Living Room Fellow

23/11/2021

Tuesday, 23 November 2021, 10:13 Updated: 10:36

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"Tiger King" Trailer Season 2 (Netflix)

The bottom line can be written even before the opening: there is no reason to watch the second season of "Tiger King". In fact, you don't even have to watch the five new episodes of the docu-series from Netflix to know that this is an unnecessary viewing experience. The truth is, it's not that the season is particularly bad, particularly boring or made particularly bad - it's just unnecessary.

The first season of the series, which members of the Israeli branch of Netflix continue to insist on calling "bad animals," was a surprising television event that came at the beginning of the Corona plague, and gave Netflix subscribers the opportunity to escape as far as possible from reality. In a review I posted on this site in March 2020 I wrote that this is a rare case of a documentary series from the real crime genre on Netflix that is not smeared too much, and at the end of the season the viewer just wants more of it. It is not inconceivable that some of the enthusiasm for the series was related to the timing of its rise, while the corona plague began to paralyze the world and we all seem to have been looking for escapism. Netflix hit the iron while it was hot, and deftly produced a special hosted by Joel McHale who interviewed the main characters in the series. The special, which came out less than a month after the series aired, garnered deadly reviews from critics and audiences, and rightly so, but Netflix did not learn the lesson, and tried to squeeze some more lemonade from the lemon remnants.

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Trump did not release him from prison.

Joe Exotic (Photo: AP, Sue Ogrocki)

The problem is that there is nothing left to squeeze. The first season of "Tiger King" managed to weave all the colorful plot lines of the story in an admirable way. Hallucinatory sex cult (like a savior, only with elephants, monkeys and big cats); A drug lord from Cuba who claims to be the inspiration for Tony Montana's character in "Scar Face"; A woman described as "Mother Theresa of the Tigers" but there is a chance she murdered her millionaire husband and fed his body to her tigers; A polygamous marriage between three men (two of them straight); Documented attacks on tigers; A fatal gun accident, lots of tattoos and a few healthy teeth. All this before we talk about the undisputed star of the series, Joe Exotic.

Let it be clear: Joe Exotic will go down in the history books as one of the best characters in the history of documentary television, but there is no way to retell his story.

To the credit of the creators of the series, they did not rummage through the archives and tried to serve us heated leftovers, but chose to flow with the plot forward in the timeline, focusing on what has happened since the first season ended.

This is a fair choice on the one hand, but also fatal to the series, because as we learned in the first season, Joe himself is in jail and therefore can not contribute too much to the new season.

Even Carol Baskin, Joe's great nemesis, naturally loses her centrality in the story.

She has no desire to provide any more television weapons to the creators of the series who portrayed her as a potential psychopathic killer, and she even tried - and failed - to prevent the second season from airing through a court restraining order.

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The ultimate villain.

Tim Stark, "Tiger King" (Photo: Netflix)

The first two episodes of the second season are still forcibly trying to revive the story of Joe Exotic and Carol Baskin, focusing on Joe's crazy supporters who tried to get Donald Trump to grant him a presidential pardon.

The second episode focuses mainly on Don Lewis, Carol Baskin's husband who mysteriously disappears.

Surprisingly, the two episodes with the most connection to the first season, which include some of its original "stars", are the weakest in the series.

It seems the creators and Netflix mostly want to show how big the talk was about the series, lo and behold, even the US president is talking about us, and the police and all sorts of famous detectives are trying to decipher our story.

But the rest of the series deals with some secondary characters from the first season, who surprisingly manage to interest far more than the original stars, mainly because they reveal the vicious circle of exotic animal trade that is always in the background, almost self-evident in the Tiger King cinematic universe. Tim Stark, a completely marginal character from the first season, becomes the big villain of this season. This is another animal dealer, just like Doc Antill (who does not appear at all in the second season) and Joe Exotic, only without the personal charm or the difficult life story. What does Dudi Amsalem say? A maniac who knows he is a maniac.

Stark is a very conscious maniac, so much so that he invented an alter-ego called "Sue" (as in Johnny Cash's song) to which he directs all his positive qualities. In the series we do not get to meet Sue or his positive qualities, but only the dangerous man who systematically abuses animals, and dumb Americans choose to give him money to watch his shows.

Focusing on Stark prevents the series from degenerating into the realms of boredom.

This is a character who is disgusting for so many different reasons, but not boring for a moment.

The focus on Stark and his deterioration from the roof of the world to bankruptcy (economic and moral) is conveniently a kind of correction for the creators of the series Rebecca Chaiklin and Eric Good, who were criticized for not showing a more rigid line towards the industry they covered.

Justifiable criticism, it should be noted.

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The only reason to justify the series.

From the second season of "Tiger King" on Netflix (Photo: Netflix)

Joe Exotic was portrayed in the first season as a complex man who suffered from a difficult childhood and became a depressive and suicidal man, whose connection to animals saved him from death. In the second season, Joe hits on a sin and explains that in prison he realized how inhuman it is to put living creatures in a cage, and asks to apologize to the tigers he once held. In a sense there is poetic justice here. Joe, who has made a living for years from exploiting powerful creatures, is exploited by the creators of "Tiger King" while imprisoned in a cage, to make some more profit. Bread and circuses. This exploitation is circular. If in the end the success of the series and the surprising evidence in it will help him get out of jail, then who is actually exploiting whom?

And there are the animals, which also this season appear mostly in the background.

At the time of writing, there are more tigers in cages in North America than free-range tigers can be found in the wild.

If there is one positive thing that can be said about the second season of "Tiger King", it is that it reminds us of this great crime that continues to exist freely in the home of the brave and the land of the free.

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