Louis Theroux: Shooting Joe Exotic – Is this for real?

"Weird!" says Louis Theroux towards the end of Louis Theroux: Shooting Joe Exotic (BBC Two, Monday, 9pm). He is tramping through the ruins of the Oklahoma wildlife park that Joe Exotic – aka Tiger King – operated for nearly 20 years.

“For real?” he adds as he enters Joe’s former living quarters. It is now a rubbish tip full of rotting furniture and rude photographs chronicling Exotic’s unorthodox love life (which included a sort of trifecta marriage to two men, both of whom were pretending to be gay).

Viewers in the habit of talking to their televisions – 12 months into lockdown, who among us isn’t? – may have already voiced similar feelings. Is this for real?

Denied access to Joe Exotic, Louis Theroux is a bit all over the place. His muddled solution is to frame the film as both a reflection on his time with the future reality star and an inquiry into the popularity of the Netflix show

The gonzo tale of Joe Exotic, currently serving a 22-year prison sentence for animal abuse and murder for hire, became a global obsession with the arrival last spring of Netflix's Tiger King series. But the story was old news to Theroux. In 2011 he had spent time with Exotic – real name Joseph Maldonado-Passage – at GW Zoo, in Wynnewood, for his programme America's Most Dangerous Pets.

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He’d staggered away dazed, confused and a little bit traumatised. And in this slightly patched-together but nonetheless gripping film he revisits that time and interrogates his feelings about Exotic in the context of the Tiger King phenomenon.

Theroux also returns to the United States to meet some of those caught up in the whirlwind.

This is where the going proves bumpy. Theroux looks genuinely terrified when Tiger King’s producers send a legal letter explaining that many of the interviewees he is pursuing, including Joe Exotic himself, have signed exclusivity deals. (A Tiger King sequel is, of course, in the works.)

The upshot is that Theroux faces being sued for millions if he goes ahead with his planned meeting with Exotic. A lawyer involved in Exotic’s bid to clear his name likens the situation to the BBC’s guardianship of Doctor Who. If someone tried to appropriate Doctor Who’s image, BBC lawyers would of course become involved.

“Joes’s not Doctor Who,” says Theroux, which honestly does feel like a point that needs making at this stage. “He’s not a fictional character!”

Theroux pads out the feature-length documentary with unaired clips of his time with Joe Exotic 10 years ago. The “Tiger King” cuts a figure familiar to viewers of the Netflix caper. There’s the same outsized hillbilly personality and terrifying jitteriness.

When Theroux sits down with Carole Baskin and her husband, they are torn between defending their good names and trying to leave behind the circus of Tiger King

Joe certainly casts a spell over Theroux, who, in the old footage, appears to crave his acceptance. “Can I have a hug? I don’t often do that. Quite weird,” reflects Theroux as he rewatches a testy interview with Exotic. “There was a part of me that liked him and was inclined to need to feel reassured that he was okay.”

Denied access to Exotic, who had got in touch from prison requesting Theroux tell his story, the film-maker is a bit all over the place. His muddled solution is to frame Shooting Joe Exotic as both a personal reflection on his time with the future reality star and an inquiry into the popularity of the Netflix show.

And it is in its metacommentary that it is most effective. This is made clear when Theroux visits Carole Baskin, the animal-rights campaigner whom Exotic was found guilty of trying to have killed.

Tiger King leaned hard into the conspiracy theory that Baskin had bumped off her second husband, Don Lewis. She naturally denies this.

More than that, Baskin and her third husband, Howard, feel they were duped by the makers of the Netflix documentary into participating in what they believed would be a film about animal welfare. When Theroux sits down with the couple (in Exotic’s old park, which they gained ownership of in a lawsuit) they are torn between defending their good names and trying to leave behind the circus of Tiger King.

“When they said they wanted to expose the bad guys we believed them,” says Don . “It wasn’t just unethical. It was downright cruel.”