If you thought Tiger King was crazy, the trailer for the next installment of the Netflix documentary promises to be even wilder. The new season premieres on the streaming platform on Nov. 17.
The new trailer opens with the line, “When you thought you’ve seen it all, you haven’t quite seen it all.”
Tiger King was a wild story with insane twists and even weirder characters. But a year later, the story has only gotten stranger. And the five-part second season promises to answer some of the lingering questions from the first season.
Things are still pretty grim for Joe Exotic, the eccentric former owner of a wild animal zoo, who serving a 17-year sentence for hiring a hitman to murder his arch-nemesis, Carole Baskin. Though, he still claims he’s innocent and is fighting for his freedom.
“There’s an innocent man in prison,” he says in a call from a Texas prison. “Everybody from the zoo is out there making money, and I’m paying the price for every one of them.”
And the trailer makes it seem like many of the first season stars capitalized on their newfound fame.
“We have more money than God right now,” Jeff Lowe, who took over Exotic’s wild animal zoo, says in the trailer.
Carole Baskin, the closest thing to a hero the show had, continues her fight to close these zoos while her big-cat rescue grows. But the lingering question about what happened to her first husband, Don Lewis, looms over her.
Tiger King 2 seems to dive deeper into the mystery in the hopes of getting some answers.
“Don liked to play with dangerous stuff,” someone in the trailer says. “They’ll kill you for that.”
Carole Baskin Denounces ‘Tiger King 2’
Don Lewis, Carole Baskin’s first husband, disappeared in 1997 while flying to Costa Rica. Joe Exotic, prone to hyperbole and lies, made the bizarre claim in Tiger King that Baskin killed him. He added that she fed his body to the tigers at her rescue. Baskin said the accusation was absurd.
Police never accused Baskin of having anything to do with her husband’s disappearance. A court pronounced him legally dead in 2002, Entertainment Weekly said.
Baskin didn’t appreciate that the documentary allowed Exotic to make such claims without evidence. In an interview with Variety, Baskin called the first season of Tiger King a “reality show dumpster fire” for how the directors portrayed her. She said they misrepresented what she said, leading her to get death threats.
“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,” she said of Tiger King. “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.”
