Exotic nemesis returns
YEARS before he became the “star”, for want of a better word, of Netflix’s docu-series Tiger King, controversial US zookeeper Joe Exotic featured in one of Louis Theroux’s documentaries.
Shown in 2011,America’s Most Dangerous Pets had involved Louis making three separate filming trips to the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park in Oklahoma, where Joe (real name: Joseph Maldonado Passage) was keeping – and breeding – a large number of tigers and other big cats.
By the third of those visits, relations between the filmmaker and his somewhat combative subject had clearly become a tad fractious. Louis had been asking a lot of awkward questions, citing in particular the objections of animal rights campaigners to Joe’s “sanctuary”. Joe was getting riled.
A decade on, we pick up the story tonight in LOUIS THEROUX: SHOOTING JOE EXOTIC (9pm), a 90-minute special for BBC2. And there’s an awful lot of it to pick up, because it’s moved on quite dramatically in the meantime.
Most significantly, Joe is now in jail. In 2019, a jury found him guilty on 17 charges of animal abuse and two of attempted murder for hire, the latter centred on a plot to kill his nemesis, animal rights activist Carole Baskin. Joe was sentenced to 22 years.
Baskin and her third husband Howard are among the people Louis meets now as he returns to Oklahoma, joining them for a rather harrowing walk around what’s left of Joe’s zoo. It’s there that Louis also raises the sensitive subject of Carole’s previous spouse, millionaire businessman Don Lewis, in whose disappearance in 1997 (Don was declared dead five years later) some have alleged she was involved.
Meanwhile, Joe’s legal team remain determined to secure his release, insisting his jailing was “a set-up”. And their explanation for the death threats he’d publicly issued against Carole?
“If you’re going to kill somebody,” they tell Louis, “you don’t talk about it…”
Elsewhere this evening, Channel 5 begins another of those edgy home-grown thrillers it does so well, a four-parter called INTRUDER (9pm).
Going out nightly until Thursday, it stars Tom Meeten and Elaine Cassidy as Sam and Rebecca, a wealthy, high-profile media pair whose luxury beachside home is broken into one night by a pair of local teenagers.
An enraged, coked-up Sam (I didn’t say anything about him not being an insufferable twonk) ends up fatally stabbing one of the intruders, then realises the police aren’t going to write this off as pure self-defence.
Time to concoct an alternative version of events.