Baz Luhrmann Might Not Run ‘The Get Down’ Season 2 (If There Is One)

As the most recent trailer only proved, Baz Luhrmann’s Netflix hip-hop drama The Get Down has become one of the more anticipated series of the year, even as the streaming service broke with its usual strategy to release season halves at different times. There’s good reason, it seems, as an eye-popping report has The Get Down at one of the most expensive series ever made, for which Luhrmann might sit out any possible second season.

Variety went fascinatingly in-depth on a behind-the scenes report from the Netflix series, the troubled production of which went from $7.5 million budgeted per episode to around $120 million overall, “among the most expensive in history.” Perhaps admirably, however, despite Luhrmann’s clash with Sony TV, Netflix insisted on retaining the Moulin Rouge! director’s vision, rather than replace him with a more budget-conscious showrunner.

That said, where Luhrmann admitted that his role expanded from something of an “uncle” to the series into one more central, a theoretical second season would ideally feature him returning to an “Uncle Baz” capacity. “I believe the particular techniques we’ve developed for this show can be passed on to a new team.”

Of course, The Get Down would have to get that far, rather than end up the first of Netflix’s originals to max out at a solitary season. It will at least emerge as the first to eschew the streaming service’s all-at-once release strategy, debuting its first six episodes on August 12, before dropping a completed second half “in the first half of next year.��� Principal photography is completed, though the latter six episodes still require “a few touches.”
So reads the official synopsis:

Baz Luhrmann’s music-driven drama from Sony Pictures Television will focus on 1970’s broken down New York City where a rag-tag crew of South Bronx teenagers are nothings and nobodies with no one to shelter them — except each other, and their verbal games, improvised dance steps, some magic markers and spray cans. Told through the lives and music of the South Bronx kids,“The Get Down” is a mythic saga of how New York at the brink of bankruptcy gave birth to hip-hop, punk and disco. Luhrmann exec produces with Catherine Martin, Stephen Adly Guirgis, Nelson George and pioneers of hip-hop, Grandmaster Flash, DJ Kool Herc and Afrika Bambaataa, who will each be portrayed on the series.

The entire article really is worth a read at the above link, but you can check out the first trailers below, and stay tuned for more details on the six-episode release and beyond.