Nick Cannon to Star in Netflix Docuseries About Co-Parenting 12 Children With 6 Mothers

Nick Cannon is taking the private logistics of his public life and putting them on Netflix. The entertainer will front a new docuseries, due this winter, that follows the reality of raising 12 children while co-parenting with six different mothers, a setup the streamer is framing as both chaotic and deeply personal.

Netflix announced the project on Wednesday, May 13, though the title has not yet been revealed. In its description, the platform said the series will offer “an intimate look” at Cannon’s “wildly unconventional life,” with the kind of language that suggests the show is aiming to sit somewhere between celebrity spectacle and domestic reckoning. The pitch leans hard into the contrast: “From million-dollar meetings to midnight diaper runs,” Netflix says, Cannon moves between a booming career and a home life that has already become one of pop culture’s favorite punchlines.

Cannon’s family history is now well documented enough that it has started to function like a timeline of his entire public era. He became a father in 2011, when he and Mariah Carey welcomed twins Moroccan and Monroe. After his split from the Grammy winner in 2014, he and podcaster Brittany Bell had three children together: son Golden Sagon in 2017, daughter Powerful Queen in 2020 and son Rise Messiah in 2022. With radio personality Abby De La Rosa, he shares twins Zion and Zillion, born in 2021, as well as 3-year-old daughter Beautiful Zeppelin. He is also father to 3-year-old son Legendary Love with Selling Sunset star Bre Tiesi, and daughter Onyx Ice, born in 2022, with LaNisha Cole.

The most painful chapter in that history came in 2021, when Cannon and model Alyssa Scott’s son Zen died of brain cancer at just a few months old. The following year, he and Scott welcomed another child together, daughter Halo. That loss has sat alongside the rest of his family life ever since, even as the jokes about his prolific parenthood have only multiplied.

For years, Cannon has been an easy target for that kind of ridicule, from fellow entertainers and from the public at large. He has usually played along, but he has also been consistent about stressing the work involved in showing up for so many children. This docuseries seems designed to make that claim visible, or at least to force viewers to sit with the contradiction between the joke and the labor underneath it.

That tension is already part of Cannon’s own account of how he got here. In September, on The Breakfast Club, the Drumline star said his past trauma may have played a role in the way he lived. “It was more of being careless, being frivolous with my process, because I could do it, because I had the money, because I had the access to whoever and however I wanted to move,” he said. “Opposed to doing a mature thing and saying, ‘Hey, well, it probably makes more sense to do this.’ And then, obviously, life happens as well. So it wasn’t like, ‘Well, I’m gonna go have 12 kids.’ It was more about, like, ‘Yo, I’mma just live life and have fun and whatever happens, happens, I can handle it.’”

The series, then, is less a reinvention than a chance to formalize the version of Cannon that has been hiding in plain sight for years: comedian, host, father, tabloid fixture, and increasingly, a man trying to narrate his own mess before somebody else does it for him.