Richard Schlesinger: Have you met these witnesses? The disappearance of Carole Baskin's then-husband Don Lewis 22 photosĪlex Spiro, an attorney and former prosecutor, is working for Lewis' daughters to help investigate what happened to their father.Īlex Spiro: There's witnesses and information that shed light on further facts and circumstances surrounding this. Richard Schlesinger: You believe he was killed, correct?Īlex Spiro: Uh, yes. If the Tiger King saga has not lost its shine for you, there are worse ways to dip into its staggering twists and turns once more.There are possible new leads in the strange case of missing millionaire Don Lewis - a man who seemed to vanish without a trace. But it is bracing, fun and surprisingly measured. You can hardly call the source material understated. Joe vs Carole is a lot to take in, as might have been expected. But there is also a sheep spray-painted to look like a tiger, a kiss with a camel and Exotic striding into a gay bar with a big cat on a chain, looking for love. There is homophobia, domestic abuse, flashbacks to the cruelties that Exotic and Baskin endured. Its tone so far is more suited to energetic hijinks than it is to death and sorrow.įor now though, it tries to find the humanity in the story and in the characters caught up in it. How it deals with those tragedies as they unfold remains to be seen. These sombre events are handled less comfortably than the raucous ones, such as a drunken seduction or a thwarted carnival show. The disappearance of Baskin’s husband, Don, and the arrival of Exotic’s young, doomed husband Travis, nudge their way in. For all of the operatic insanity, there are tragedies at the heart of it, and by the end of episode three this has to address them. This is a sensible move, which, in another strange revelation, turns out to be a quality the story sorely needed. The choice was clearly made to avoid parody at all costs. It takes a few moments to settle in (particularly for viewers aware of McKinnon’s sketch show past and skill as an impressionist) and then becomes more certain of itself. It would be easy for them to tip into parody, given that there is so much that lends itself to caricature about both characters. Both are perfectly cast, and do well with a tough task. John Cameron Mitchell, of Hedwig and the Angry Inch and latterly The Good Fight, is Joe Exotic, a lost soul who finds his own kind of salvation in big cats, though his fork in the road takes him down a much darker path. Saturday Night Live’s Kate McKinnon is Baskin, the woman with a troubled past who channels her energies into her big cat rescue sanctuary, all the while plotting to take down the big cat traders who appear troublingly prolific in the US. But for all its extravagance and wildness, it may turn out to be more sensitive than the Netflix series.Ĭhanneling her energies into big cat rescue … Kate McKinnon as Carole Baskin. It is hugely entertaining, striking just the right tone, half absurd, half empathic, aware of its own limitations (those CGI wild animals would make the live-action Lion King blush) and playing up the flawed characters at the heart of it. I say this cautiously, based on the first three episodes which were made available for review in advance. Yet here we are, with an eight-part drama that seems to have pulled it off. It is also hard to see how the makers would ever be able to shape a story so far-fetched that if it were not true, it would be beyond the realms of possibility to seem in any way believable. It is hard to see why it needed to be made, given that the sheer outrageousness of the Joe Exotic/Carole Baskin big cat feud already seen in Netflix’s bombastic documentary Tiger King (though this new show is based on a podcast, rather than that series). O f all the true-life dramas that have made their way to our screens lately, Joe vs Carole (Peacock/Now TV) is the most perplexing.
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