Netflix Renews 'Tiger King' for Season 2

By Libby Birk

Tiger King is coming back for a second season! Netflix announced Thursday that the long-rumored second go for the docu-series that took over quarantine life in 2020 will premiere later this year, although the specific date is not yet confirmed.

Although Netflix is only now confirming the existence of a Season 2, there have been widespread rumors about a potential follow-up. After the first season premiered in March 2020, Tiger King co-director Rebecca Chaiklin told Entertainment Weekly, "We have a crazy amount of footage," and said, "There could be a follow-up on this story because there's a lot that's still unfolding in it, and it'll be just as dramatic and just as colorful as what has unfolded these past few years." While Netflix gave no information about which of the colorful characters from Season 1 might return, Chaiklin and producer Eric Goode will be back.

Tiger King Season 1 was an instant smash hit when it premiered at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States in March 2020, attracting a staggering 64 million households in its first week alone. The show chronicled the intense rivalry between big cat "enthusiasts" Joe Exotic (real name Joseph Maldonado-Passage) and Carole Baskin. The series took a dark turn when Joe Exotic, a gun-toting polygamist country singer who owned an Oklahoma roadside zoo, was arrested for hatching a murder-for-hire plot involving Baskin, owner a big cat sanctuary in Florida and who is shrouded in her own cloud of mystery. Joe Exotic is currently serving a 17-year prison sentence. 

Tiger King Season 2 comes as Peacock greenly a scripted limited series based on the Netflix hit called Joe Exotic, starring John Cameron Mitchell as Joe Exotic and Kate McKinnon as Carole Baskin. While another Joe Exotic series starring Nicolas Cage was initially in development at Amazon, that project has been scrapped. Cage told Variety that "Amazon ultimately felt that it was material that had become past tense because it took so long for it to come together" and that "they felt at one point that it was lightning in a bottle, but that point has since faded into the distance and it's no longer relevant."

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