After Netflix announced earlier this week that Tiger King would return for the second season of mayhem, the streaming service announced at its TUDUM event on Saturday that tigerKing 2 will debut on Wednesday, Nov. 17.The sequel to the cultural phenomenon had long been rumored and reported, but fans finally confirmed that another season of madness would return in 2021.
Tiger King became a cultural moment in March 2020 when its launch coincided with shutdowns across the United States at the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Throughout seven episodes, Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness told the story of “Joe Exotic,” or Joseph Maldonado-Passage, who kept tigers, lions, and other big cats in Oklahoma. Among the various storylines was a murder-for-hire plot against Carole Baskin, a woman who ran a facility in Tampa, Florida called Big Cat Rescue and had lobbied to shut down facilities like Joe Exotic.
Baskin could finance her battle through the fortune she inherited from her late husband, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances years ago. In January 2020, Joe Exotic was sentenced to 22 years in federal prison after being convicted of trying to hire two different men to kill Baskin. A federal appeals court ruled in July that he should get a shorter prison sentence.
While it’s still unclear if Season 2 will focus heavily on Joe Exotic and Baskin, directors Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaiklin are confirmed to return for the sequel filmed in 2020 and into part of 2021. They previously told Entertainment Weekly that they had plenty of material for a potential follow-up. “We have a crazy amount of footage,” Chaiklin 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.”
Baskin made her thoughts about the sequel clear, telling Variety that she wanted Chaiklin and Goode to “lose my number” and calling Tiger King “a reality show dumpster fire.” “I know some people who have been involved in it, and they were doing more filming, so I assumed at some point they would come out with a Tiger King 2. It took them five years to put together the first one, so I thought it would be a lot longer,” she said.