PLOT: The crazy story of Joe Exotic continues. With Joe in prison, others from the series seek to capitalize on their fame. Meanwhile, a team forms to press Donald Trump for a presidential pardon. The investigation continues and new character details are revealed.
REVIEW: Right as the pandemic began in 2020, people around the world were starved for things to do. People began baking bread, knitting, and other hobbies but countless others turned to binge-watching. One of the biggest shows to benefit from the literally captive audience at the time was Netflix’s true crime documentary series, Tiger King. The crazy but true tale of Joe Exotic and his quest to get Carole Baskin killed became a pop culture sensation. Netflix quickly capitalized on the seven-episode show with an hour special hosted by Joel McHale. Now, the requisite sequel is here to cash in on everyone still infatuated with Exotic, Baskin, and the entire cast of characters involved with this tale.
Spread over five episodes, Tiger King 2 follows in the footsteps of so many true-crime series that return for a second season in having limited material to work with. Like Netflix’s earlier true-crime hit, Making a Murderer, season 2 of Tiger King spends a lot of time showing how the success of the show itself factored into the lives of everyone involved. The premiere episode starts out with a look at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and how it turned these supporting characters into autograph signing sensations around their hometowns. It also looks at the audience divide between those in support of freeing Joe Exotic from prison and those who made death threats against Carole Baskin. In short, Tiger King 2 turns the camera on the audience and makes us all a character in this story.
Seeing how the story of Joe Exotic factored into the insanity that was 2020 is tangible in this second season, especially when we see how supporters of Joe being pardoned by President Trump were present at the January 6 insurrection in Washington, D.C. It is an eerie parallel seeing how this television drama evolved into a cause du jour for many. The focus of these episodes does seem to weigh heavily on how the Netflix series impacted the perception of these people as well as Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin, themselves. While Baskin has tried to distance herself from this documentary, filmmakers Eric Goode & Rebecca Chaiklin rely heavily on recorded phone calls of Exotic from his prison cell.
The five-episode season often plays like a clip show, inserting Joe Exotic’s various music videos and replaying his various videos. The real bulk of this season centers on the campaign to exonerate Joe Exotic as his new legal team continue to investigate other leads, convinced that Joe was wrongly convicted. It is very apparent as you watch this season that people are clearly aligned in believing Joe to be guilty or innocent with no room for the truth to fall somewhere in the middle. Because of that, the interviewees in these episodes regularly come across as crazy for not realizing the type of people they were associated with or just in this for the chance at becoming a minor celebrity.
Because of this reliance on what happened after the events depicted in the first season, this follow-up never comes nearly as close to being as engaging as the original. Tiger King was a journey into the white trash insanity that was the world of Joe Exotic. Tiger King 2 consistently feels like a look at how everyone perceived Tiger King 1. It is a circular and self-referential mash-up that fails to be very engaging. The saving grace may be the final episode which does reveal some information that could alter who you view as the true criminals in this odyssey but it then begs the question of why it took a Netflix documentary crew to uncover it.
If you were one of the countless people infatuated by Tiger King last year, then Tiger King 2 will be a nice return to this strange, surreal story, but one that will not uncover much new material we have not seen countless times before. At best, this feels like a cash grab that could have been whittled down into one or two episodes at most. At five, this is overlong and redundant without offering much new material to make this worth watching. But, with many still sticking close to home as the pandemic lingers, maybe this is the right series to revisit.
Tiger King 2 is now streaming on Netflix.