Boyers, PA (February 4, 2026)—Comedian/musician Fred Armisen (SNL; Late Night with Seth Meyers) will take TV viewers on a deep dive into Iron Mountain Entertainment Services’ legendary archival facility in Boyers, PA later this year, when the facility becomes the site of an upcoming CNN Original music docuseries.
Untitled for now, the series will be set within UMG’s archives at the Iron Mountain facility, located 220 feet underground in a former limestone mine. In each episode, the show will plumb the archives for original and alternate recordings, photos, and video performances, album artwork and more, much of which will not have been seen publicly before.
While the archival materials will be used to take viewers both above ground and back in time to present music history in context, the show promises to make extensive use of its unusual setting, highlighting archival practices and the search to unearth and recover “lost” or unknown artifacts from the UMG vaults.
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“This series was born from a desire to show fans what it’s like to mine the greatest underground musical archive in the world, giving them a sense of the hunt, the challenge, the thrill of this work as well as direct access to the dedicated experts who preserve and champion these incredible musical legacies,” says Will Tanous, executive producer/UMG EVP and chief administrative officer.
Sifting through millions of items in the Iron Mountain vaults is no small task, in large part due to decades of inconsistent archival practices before items were sent to the facility. Many recordings stored there were first labeled with incomplete ID information; a given tape box might only list an artist and song name, but not state whether its a master, two-track, duplicate, outtake, live rendition or something else—all of which makes organizing and archiving items a challenge.
Addressing the issue, Iron Mountain has made notable strides to automate the cataloging of materials in recent years, creating custom machinery like its AMICS (Automated Media Image Capture System) to ascertain and ingest metadata derived from tape boxes, film reels and the like.
While the former limestone mine is a secure, climate-controlled, underground place to keep treasured media, there’s one threat that Iron Mountain can’t keep out—and that’s media degradation, ranging from old multitrack tapes shedding oxide to old hard drives that are no longer readable. Increasingly, the recovery of pop culture archival materials isn’t just a matter of locating the item—it’s a race against time.
All of this will surely provide an undercurrent of urgency for the show as Armisen takes viewers through music history. While best known as a comedian and actor, Armisen is no stranger to the music world, having played drums for punk band Trenchmouth, released soundtracks to his cult TV series Portlandia and Documentary Now, and hosted the NAMM TEC Awards in 2020 and 2022.
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The upcoming series isn’t the first time the underground site has hosted a documentary crew—back in 2016, Iron Mountain was visited by the Iron Man himself, Ozzy Osbourne, for an episode of the History Channel series, Ozzy & Jack’s World Detour, where the rocker explored the Sony vault, discovering ephemera from across his career.
The new CNN Original Series is slated to air later this year.