Who Is Tiger King's Biggest Villain? We Have Thoughts

Carole Baskin And Joe Exotic With A Tiger From Tiger King

Like the rest of the world, we here at CinemaBlend are obsessed with Tiger King. In addition to the dozens of articles we’ve written, we’ve also wasted a lot of work hours yelling at each other on Slack about characters, theories, observations and even which memes we like the best. This weekend, we finally decided to turn these daily arguments into content and decided to jump on a group video to hash out who Tiger King’s biggest villain is. Not surprisingly, we did not agree. At all. You can check it out below...

The above video is running over at our YouTube page. In addition to yours truly, the video also features CinemaBlend Managing Director Sean O’Connell, Video Team Manager Hannah Saulic and Senior Video Producer Jeff McCobb, and we all come from this with pretty different perspectives. 

It’s pretty high praise that all of us could watch Tiger King and end up with a different take on who the primary villain of the show is. Some of that is due to how absolutely, positively wild these people are, but some of it is also due to how well the docuseries is edited. It never comes out and tells viewers how to think. It also does a really good job of presenting complicated and nuanced perspectives of all these people. Perhaps even more importantly, it doesn’t blurt out all the positive things or all the negative things at once.

In 7 episodes (or maybe soon to be 8), Tiger King does a great job of spacing out all its reveals and using the right interview footage at the right moment. The show wouldn’t work if it was four episodes of negative followed by 3 episodes of positive. Instead, we slowly learn more and more about each of these people, some of which makes us like them more and some of which make us like them less.

Regardless, we want to hear from you. Who do you think Tiger King’s biggest villain is? Is it main character Joe Exotic, who is, at various points, accused of animal abuse, trying to hire a hitman to murder someone, mistreating his staff, among other things? Or what about Carole Baskin, who has unrelenting tattle-tale energy, uses an army of volunteers and may have fed her ex-husband to tigers? Or how about Doc Antle who has an army of wives/ partners, may be running a cult and is accused of sending adult tigers to gas chambers? Or how about Jeff Lowe, who takes the zoo from Joe and sets the plot to take Joe Exotic down in motion?

There are so many options. Vote in the poll below to let us know your take or hit up the comment section…

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Editor In Chief

Mack Rawden is the Editor-In-Chief of CinemaBlend. He first started working at the publication as a writer back in 2007 and has held various jobs at the site in the time since including Managing Editor, Pop Culture Editor and Staff Writer. He now splits his time between working on CinemaBlend’s user experience, helping to plan the site’s editorial direction and writing passionate articles about niche entertainment topics he’s into. He graduated from Indiana University with a degree in English (go Hoosiers!) and has been interviewed and quoted in a variety of publications including Digiday. Enthusiastic about Clue, case-of-the-week mysteries, a great wrestling promo and cookies at Disney World. Less enthusiastic about the pricing structure of cable, loud noises and Tuesdays.