In a whole cast of morally dubious people, Carole Baskin clearly came off as the villain in "Tiger King".

Today, I just finished Netflix's sensational docudrama in the midst of my own quarantine from the Coronavirus, finishing the entire series in the course of two days. I genuinely could not keep my eyes off the documentary and its ridiculousness. I thoroughly enjoyed the series and have participated in discussing and joking about the show with my friends. I don't think I am in any sort of position to judge the cast and its morally compromised group of people given my own sins, but most characters, no matter how they treat people or animals in the show, are sympathetic. I find myself sympathizing and drawn to Jeff Lowe, Joe Exotic, and Doc Antle. I find them to be tragic figures put into difficult situations where they did what they need to survive.

I know that Doc Antle collects and controls women to the point of pushing them to get boob jobs. I know that Jeff Lowe is a felon that strangled his ex-wife and used tigers to find women. I know that the star of our show, Joe Maldonado-Passage tried to hire someone to kill someone, manipulated the drug addiction of his ex-husband, Travis, and drove Travis to kill himself. All of these men are cruel to animals, and yet they're still portrayed as flawed human beings in "Tiger King".

The only person that is not portrayed sympathetically is Carole Baskin, the animal rights activist and owner of Big Cat Rescue. The directors of the show, Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaiklin, spend an entire episode showing footage speculating on whether Carole Baskin killed her ex-husband. It depicts her as a sanctimonious owner of exotic animals in Big Cat Rescue that treats exotic animals the exact same way Joe Exotic and Doc Antle do, yet pretends to be above them.

"Tiger King" reminds me of perceptions of the 2016 Presidential election. The underlying battle behind "Tiger King" is a battle behind Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin and their efforts to expose each other, ruin each other's lives, and even kill one another. Joe is portrayed as an immoral, chaotic, but charismatic buffoon. Carole is portrayed as conniving, robotic, and unsympathetic.

Although I wouldn't necessarily say that Joe Exotic is the protagonist, he is the center of the show. We are drawn to be more sympathetic towards Joe despite his moral transgressions of manipulating people's addictions for sexual gain, mistreatment of animals, and current 22-year sentence for a murder-for-hire against Carole Baskin.

Carole is entirely unsympathetic. Far beyond the fact that the show strongly implies that she kills her husband. Witnesses like police detectives, Carole's late husband's children, ex-wife, assistant, and handyman, all believe that Carole killed her husband or that the investigation was not thorough enough, especially since her late husband's will was amended to include "in the case of my disappearance". And since Carole took in most of her husband's inheritance, it's very hard not to believe, after watching the third episode, that Carole kills her husband and that she's on a quest to ruin the lives of Joe, Tim Stark, Doc Antle, and other zoo owners that do the exact same thing she does: caging animals and making money off of it.

"But in a series that is bursting with felons, cult leaders, polygamists, wife abusers, animal abusers, and cruel egomanics, it's Baskin alone who's treated without sympathy," writes Willa Paskin of Slate.

Paskin notes that it is Carole who took in the animals other people wouldn't keep, and who was trying to stop breeding and petting by championing legislation in Congress. She doesn't go as far as the other men who abuse animals in the show, and yet the show depicts Carole as the worst the show has to offer. She is depicted as, in the words of Paskin, "a hypocrite and an elitist" because she seems like she acts so untouchable from her ivory tower. She is the most wealthy among big cat people, having a lot of inherited money and a husband that went to Harvard.

Even after winning the trademark infringement case against Joe, she goes farther to destroy Joe Exotic and destroy her rivals on a personal level. The show shows all of Joe's threats toward Carole, from his song showing an actor of Carole feeding her husband to a tiger to shooting a doll of Carole with his rifle. Joe's narcissistic and outrageous shenanigans, jokes, and actions are all understandable, and a news anchor notes that Joe always makes for good news and TV in the sense that you cannot look away from him.

No matter what he does, Joe is someone that grabs our attention all the time, and someone who we can always understand the motives of. He is flawed, but he gives all of himself in a compelling manner. At the very end, we come to see Joe, for all his legal and moral transgressions, as a convenient scapegoat for other deplorable men like Jeff Lowe, Jame Garretson, and Allen Glover to escape consequences.

"He was like a mythical character living out in the middle of bumfuck Oklahoma who owned 1200 tigers and lions and bears and shit," said Rick Kirkham, director of Joe's Internet reality show.

I finished the show liking Joe, and hating Carole. And I'm writing this article defending Carole precisely because of that reaction, because in the world of reality TV, most people can't help but have the same gut reaction.

I equate the battle of Joe vs. Carole to Trump vs. Hillary because "Tiger King" brought me back to the discourse about the TV-savviness and character of the two Presidential candidates. Trump was someone you couldn't help but listen to and be outraged by, while Hillary was guarded and robotic and always tried to say the right things. if politics were a realm of theater instead of policy, which I'm starting to see more and more, Trump was a lot better at theater and reality TV.

And so Joe is much better at reality TV than Carole. Carole had, in. the words of Paskin, "a strangely unemotional affect". When Carole got stressed, she started laughing hysterically, and her words in the documentary always seem very guarded and very coached in their responses. She doesn't reveal nearly as much about herself and her life as Joe does. She's controlled and almost robotic in her responses, always trying to say the right and correct things, which is exactly why it's so sad that viewers on social media saw her as a villain.

"She's not a character—she's a zealot single-mindedly dedicated to her one cause," Paskin said.

It's easy to see Joe Exotic as a human being, and that's why we feel drawn to him. In her depiction in "Tiger King," it's not easy to see Carole as a human being, but a robot who doesn't even seem to have feelings. It's easy to see Carole as precisely the kind of person that would kill her husband, take his money, and get away with it.

It's just speculation, but so what if Carole actually did kill her husband? Would that actually make her any worse than men like Joe Exotic, Doc Antle, and Jeff Lowe? These men lead cults, strangle their wives, prey on drug addicts and ex-convicts, and abuse animals to lure young women. Think about how long the show spends showing what Carole might have done compared to what these men did do. Jeff Lowe getting a felony for strangling his ex-wife is barely mentioned. Ask yourself if that is actually fair, and ask yourself whether the social media backlash against Carole and simultaneous glamorization of Joe is really just.

Carole is no saint. She is a bit of a hypocrite and is sanctimonious in how she cages animals and criticizes others for doing the same. But every character in the show is complicated, besides Carole Baskin, who is caricatured as the "evil bitch". And that is precisely the problem -- not that most characters are privileged with humane portrayals, but that Carole wasn't given the same grace.