One of audio entertainment’s top studios is hitting the gas on a fresh slate of top-tier titles, including a new season of “Revisionist History” from Pushkin Industries co-founder Malcom Gladwell and author Michael Lewis revisiting “The Big Short” as an audio book and companion podcast.
Pushkin execs are also touting the return of “Heavyweight,” the deep-dive exploration of issues and personal relationships hosted by Jonathan Goldstein, who acts like “a therapist with a time machine,” per the company. The first season to air under the Pushkin banner debuts Sept. 18 for a 10-episode run.
“This new slate of podcasts showcases the passion we have at Pushkin for the power of creative and premium audio storytelling,” Pushkin CEO Gretta Cohn told Variety. “We are excited by what our dynamic roster of storytellers will bring to audiences as we continue building the future of audio — one story at a time.”
The fall release slate comes as Pushkin also renews its podcast ad sales and distribution pact with iHeartMedia. Pushkin Industries, founded in 2018 by Gladwell and former Slate Group CEO Jacob Weisberg, first teamed with iHeart in 2020. Weisberg is CEO of Pushkin. Eric Sandler, Pushkin’s chief strategy officer, discusses the audio studio’s creative ethos and business outlook in an interview featured on the Sept. 4 edition of the “Daily Variety” podcast.
Pushkin has big plans to mark the 10-year anniversary of the movie “The Big Short,” based on Lewis’ best-seller of the same name. The Adam McKay-helmed film starring Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt captured the dynamics that led to the mortgage meltdown of 2008-09 crisis.
On Oct. 14, Pushkin will publish the first audiobook edition of “The Big Short” narrated by Lewis, the highly regarded scribe behind such nonfiction books as “Moneyball” and “Liar’s Poker.” Lewis also hosts the eclectic “Against the Rules” recurring Pushkin podcast. On the same day as the audiobook release, Lewis will launch a companion “Big Short” podcast “exploring how the events detailed in the book led to what we see happening in U.S. politics more than a decade later,” per Pushkin.
Lidia Jean Kott, a reporter known to Pushkin listeners for her work with Lewis on “Against the Rules,” will take the helm of her own investigative docuseries “The Chinatown Sting,” about a notorious Manhattan undercover drug bust in the late 1980s. The six-episode run begins Sept. 16.
Gladwell returns to his long-running “Revisionist History” series with a deep dive into the disturbing Alabama murder case involving surrounding the 1988 murder of Elizabeth Sennett. The long sordid legal saga came to a somber end in January 2024 when Kenneth Eugene Smith was executed via nitrogen gas in Alabama after being convicted in a murder-for-hire plot. “At its core, it’s a story about the cascade of moral failures, performative justice, and why systems set up to relieve suffering so often make suffering worse,” per Pushkin. The seven-episode season bows Oct. 2.
Leon Neyfakh, host of Pushkin’s historical docu-series “Fiasco,” turns his prism to “a hard look at the 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya and the ramifications it had on everything from social media to world politics.” The six-episode season bows Sept. 18.
In addition to publishing a range of podcasts, the Pushkin network includes a healthy menu of audiobook titles.
Pushkin’s fall lineup also includes fresh episodes of six returning series:
** “The Happiness Lab”
** “Cautionary Tales”
** “Broken Record”
** “A Slight Change of Plans”
** “Risky Business”
** “What’s Your Problem?”
