HBO renews Bill Simmons’ Music Box doc collection for a second season

HBO has renewed Bill Simmons’ Music Box documentary series for a second season. The first season, which ends December 16 with the release of Tommy Oliver’s Juice WRLD: Into The Abyss, aired throughout the second half of 2021.

HBO said in a statement that, like season one, “Each film will be helmed by a different, visionary director.” There’s no word yet on who those directors will be, or which music moments they’ll choose as their subjects.

Season one featured six documentaries that aired on HBO and streamed on
HBO Max. The first was this summer’s Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage, directed by Garret Price.

The first season continued weekly in the fall and also included Jagged, which was directed by Alison Klayman and was all about Alanis Morissette. Morissette denounced the film and said the doc had a “salacious agenda.”

Other entries included DMX: Don’t Try To Understand, directed by Christopher Frierson, and Listening to Kenny G, directed by Penny Lane, while John Maggio’s Mr. Saturday Day Night is about Australian entrepreneur Robert Stigwood, who produced Saturday Night Fever.

When the first Music Box film dropped this summer, Simmons said his goal was to make “rewatchable” music documentaries, similar to ESPN’s 30 for 30 sports documentary series that he helped pioneer. He explained, “I’ve been thinking about this idea since 2014, and the big influence for me was a documentary about the Eagles. I thought it was the best music documentary I’d ever seen, and what was interesting to me was that it was rewatchable.”

Simmons continued, “I remember I watched it like four times that summer, and the best 30 for 30s we did are the ones that you could watch five, six times. That Eagles doc really made me think there is a way to do what we did with 30 for 30, but with music. There’s a way to make rewatchable, high-end, awesome docs, and put them under the framework of some sort of series.”