Trailblazer Studios launches podcast initiative to capture booming audience

Trailblazer Studios today announced the launch of its podcast initiative, a new venture motivated by the fast-growing medium. Its first podcast will kick off with American Sport, debuting April 21and available to stream on all platforms including Apple and Spotify.

Known for its premium entertainment content and storytelling, Trailblazer is poised to broaden its format and reach by penetrating this platform and will embrace a variety of influential, topical genres, including sports, social justice and true crime. All series will be adapted into television formats.

“The expansion into podcasting allows us to be creatively nimble and amplify our voice in the premium scripted and nonfiction landscape,” says Jeff Lanter, president and COO of Trailblazer Studios. “It also allows us the opportunity to tell the stories we want to tell beyond the boundaries of linear television.”

The division is off to a running start with American Sport, which goes back in time to reveal how sports became an indelible part of the American experience. Hosted by Matt Andrews, one of country’s most reputable sports history professors, the series will explore the sporting events that have defined our culture and changed the course of American history. American Sport goes beyond the “sports page” telling of races won, touchdowns scored, and players rounding the bases, and explains how those moments on the field of play have been intricately tied to ideas and debates in our nation about race, class, gender, ethnicity, capitalism, and American identity.

Matt Andrews added: “In American Sport, we will explore how Americans used sports like baseball, basketball, boxing, track and field, and horse racing to make claims of group pride as well as racial, ethnic, and gender superiority. But I will also tell you how other Americans used those same sports to challenge those claims. These ‘us v. them’ debates in American sports history sometimes culminated with lives being lost. As you will hear in our podcast, sports are not mere games and frivolous distractions. They are serious business.”

American Sport is developed and created by Matt Andrews. Katye Rone and Jeff Lanter serve as executive producers. Casey Helmick is consulting producer, with Aurelia Belfield as producer.

The news comes hot on the heels of an already busy year for Trailblazer. Recently, the company announced a first-of-its-kind television endeavor with Reuters to adapt its highly acclaimed, award-winning investigative series The Body Trade and is currently producing the groundbreaking documentary Red Summer for NatGeo. Trailblazer, which delivered nearly 100 hours of original programming in 2020, is currently producing several unannounced blue-chip, natural-history and premium-documentary series for several networks, including OWN, Discovery and more.