It's been over a year since Netflix's Tiger King since hit our screens and, for the most part, the hype had mostly died down. However, Netflix isn't quite done with the story of Joe Exotic, as it was recently announced that work on Tiger King 2 is underway, much to the dismay of Exotic's rival. Carole Baskin. The Big Cat Rescue CEO recently slammed the docuseries' creators after the Season 2 update but she also explained why she’ll still need to watch it when it streams.
It makes sense that Carole Baskin wouldn’t be thrilled about another documentary, especially since she’s been on the receiving end of so many jokes and has experienced legal trouble since the series aired last year. In an interview with Variety, Baskin said she assumed there would be more to the docuseries and was aware they were working on Season 2 but that she doesn’t consider it a documentarian work at all. In fact, she calls the whole production a “dumpster fire,” saying:
I know some people who have been involved in it and they were doing more filming, so I assumed at some point they would come out with a Tiger King 2. It took them five years to put together the first one, so I thought it would be a lot longer. . . . I wouldn’t call Eric Goode or Rebecca Chaiklin true documentarians. I mean that was just a reality show dumpster fire.
According to Carole Baskin, the Tiger King directors did not do her justice, and the finished documentary apparently wasn’t what they had discussed. In the same interview, Baskin recalled the conversations she had to have with her friends and family to set the record straight about the way she was portrayed, which is something she assumes will need to happen again after Tiger King’s second season. With this, it seems she'll be tuning in for this new season:
My phone started ringing off the hook for three months straight, people cursing at me and telling me that they wanted to burn the place to the ground and they wanted to kill me and my family and the cats. So whatever Tiger King 2 does, I’ll have that same reaction from the public that has been misled. I’ll have to spend a lot of time explaining to them how they have been misled, which means I have to watch it.
During Netflix's fan event, Tudum, it was announced that Tiger King 2 is set to be released on Netflix on November 17. While it sounds like Carole Baskin will be watching right along with us, it’s unclear if Joe Exotic will be allowed to tune in from his jail cell. Fans of the wild docuseries may also want to keep an eye out for the upcoming Joe Exotic series for Peacock TV, which is sure to capture the essence of the polarizing doc.
