The rollout for Crooked Media’s first audio documentary, The Wilderness, began yesterday with the launch of a standalone website — which gives a preview of the season’s overall 15-part structure as well as the extensive list of interviewees who will be featured on the program — along with a trailer that was also dropped in the Pod Save America RSS feed, which pushed the podcast feed up the charts. (Tried-and-true pre-launch strategy, this.)
The series will debut on July 16. Two things to note here:
- Interestingly, The Wilderness is a coproduction between Crooked Media and Two-Up Productions, the shop behind Limetown and 36 Questions. Pretty big get for the latter.
- Also: What’s always been super interesting to me about Crooked Media is how…hard it is to describe. Yes, it’s a media company, albeit one that’s explicitly political, and though there are certainly media companies with overtly political bents across history — from progressive magazines like The Nation to right-wing outlets like Fox News — there’s something about Crooked Media that feels a little more, for lack of better word, alive. Or to put it another way: openly willing to directly interact with the physical world, where conventional media companies often feel separate and apart from the world. A very smart Hot Pod reader once floated the idea of a world in which a platform like Crooked Media could very well perform functions resembling that of…well, political parties. It’s a curious idea, and I’m further curious to see how The Wilderness extends this thesis.