[UPDATED 9/25]: Well, we now know exactly when Tiger King 2 will be available for streaming. At today’s Tudum event, Netflix revealed that the follow-up the 2020 series will return on November 17. “We’ve only scratched the surface,” the streamer teased in the date announcement clip.
Where were you in the spring of 2020? You were at home, most likely, but what were you doing at the time? Other than washing your groceries with bleach and paying exorbitant prices for cheap cloth masks off the internet? If we had to guess, we’d say you were probably watching Netflix’s Tiger King, the closest thing television has had to a universal cultural moment since… the moon landing? The end of M*A*S*H? Actually, the Game Of Thrones finale might be a better point of comparison, because pretty much as soon as Tiger King happened, people got extremely goddamn sick of hearing about it. We did, you did, actual tigers in their actual natural habitat probably did. Still, though, something with that level of cultural impact can’t just go away, which is why Peacock is making a show about Tiger King breakout star(?) Joe Exotic and why Amazon briefly tried to do the same with Nicolas Cage in the starring role.
Now, Netflix itself has confirmed what everyone already suspected: It’s very much still in the Joe Exotic business, and its making a Tiger King follow-up series called Tiger King 2. Hoo boy. Here we go again. This news comes from a new trailer that Netflix released today that bills the streaming service as “the home of true crime,” with the Tiger King announcement coming alongside announcements of other true crime documentary projects like The Puppet Master: Hunting The Ultimate Conman, The Tinder Swindler (sometimes you do the title first and then figure out everything else later), Trust No One: The Hunt For The Crypto King, and Bad Vegan. All of those are set for 2022, but Tiger King 2 is supposed to come out before the end of 2021.
For the optimal viewing experience, we recommend doing that elbow bump instead of handshakes, adopting a new hobby that you won’t shut up about on Zoom calls with your friends, and picking up a new sense of crushing, inescapable dread that makes you simultaneously desperate for and horrified of human contact. You know, for that perfect mix of 2020 nostalgia.