‘Surviving R. Kelly’ producers on why a Part 2 was needed

Lifetime’s crime docuseries “Surviving R. Kelly” made a splash upon its premiere last January — leading to the R&B star’s arrest on sex-abuse charges and spurring a three-part followup series, “Surviving R. Kelly, The Reckoning.”

“We never knew how big it was going to become,” says “Surviving” executive producer Brie Miranda Bryant. “But what was so fantastic was that the actual conversation that it generated transcended the documentary and became a global conversation about sexual violence. I was sent articles that were completely in Mandarin from people over in China where the documentary, and the conversation around it, was being covered.”

“Surviving R. Kelly” broke a record when it premiered to 2 million viewers, who watched interviews with survivors of the 52-year-old singer’s alleged abuse as well as his former friends like Sparkle.

In the months that followed, Kelly was dropped by his record label and formally charged with 10 counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse. He’s currently in a federal jail in Chicago awaiting his May 2020 trial.

Premiering Jan. 2 at 9 p.m., “Surviving R. Kelly: The Reckoning” features interviews with a whopping 70 subjects who, in some cases, speak about the backlash they experienced for speaking up in the original.

Executive producer Jesse Daniels, who worked on “Surviving,” says a sequel was never intended. “We sat back for a while [after Part 1 aired],” he says. “There were news outlets all around the world reporting on this story. And so we knew that if we were going to do a follow up, we’d have to go deeper and do something people aren’t already seeing on the news now.

“Sadly after the documentary, we got messages from other survivors. We were weighing all these big decisions knowing we had more story to tell.”

Bryant says that what tipped the scale to doing a followup was information they learned about Kelly’s 2003 arrest in Florida on child pornography charges.

“After the first documentary aired, it was a topic of conversation about whether we’d do a Part 2,” she says. “And the answer was ‘absolutely no.’ “We were worried that if we did a Part 2, and it wasn’t as strong of a platform as Part 1, that we would be doing a disservice to our survivors.

“But one story ended up bubbling up … what happened during [Kelly’s 2003] arrest in Florida for the Chicago warrant,” she says. “There were allegedly more tapes and videos of disturbing images that were found, and Florida had pressed charges. They ultimately ended up dropping those charges. A reporter said, ‘Could you not have found a way?’ and the answer they got was, ‘Well, we could have, but they’re not our girls.’

“That just triggered everything for everyone in production — this idea of ‘who’s girls are they?,'” she says. “That’s thematically how we tried to put together Part 2.”

And while the series did lead to Kelly’s arrest, the producers maintain that their original goal was simply to make the survivor’s voices heard.

“You’ll hear more from the survivors in Part 2 in terms of how they think and feel about [Kelly getting arrested and formally charged],” says Bryant. “I think justice looks like different things for different people.”