SerpApi.Org
Jennifer Palmieri was rushing through the Atlanta airport the other day on her way down to Laredo, Texas, when she paused to make an observation. "I mean, the world comes through here," she said, speaking by phone. "Why wouldn't you try to understand?"
Palmieri is in the process of helping us do just that. The former White House director of communications under Barack Obama as well as the head of comms for Hillary Clinton in 2016 has undertaken an ambitious goal: to help TV viewers get at the nuances of the political South.
She and Pod Save America-company Crooked Media are producing a six-part documentary TV series called Long Play, The Hollywood Reporter has learned. The show aims to uncover fundamental issues and profound shifts in a way daily news coverage doesn't. Palmieri has brought along former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu and veteran journalist and The 19theditor-at-large Errin Haines as co-hosts, each bringing their experience to bear on the nonfiction show.
Crooked Media, co-founded by former Obama speechwriter and Palmieri colleague Jon Favreau, will executive produce the show, as will Favreau; they'll help market and distribute it. Long Play will also live on YouTube.
Palmieri thinks the series could be the tonic for what's ailing political journalism.
"There is so much resignation about the region - you hear Democrats say ‘don't bother with the South, you can't win there.'" said the media vet, who also spent several years co-hosting Showtime's The Circus later in its run. "And the reality is it's so much more complicated."
To unearth that complexity the trio will use their Rolodexes to get powerful people to talk while also attending rallies, interviewing voters and generally giving a view from the ground up.
Georgia power players Stacey Abrams, Marjorie Taylor Green and Brian Kemp have already been interviewed for the debut Georgia episode, which is expected to hit online next week. The Texas episode will center on a James Talarico rally in Laredo and move on from there.
"Each place is fascinating in its own way and has its own dynamics. Georgia, where we've been, was the birthplace of civil rights but also a very conservative state," Palmieri said. "I really think there's an appetite for this kind of content."
Among the other states are North Carolina and Oklahoma, with the remaining two to be determined.
"People in the South feel really misunderstood - left behind, looked down on - and they want to explain that to somebody," Landrieu says in the trailer. (You can watch it below.)
Producers have also brought on some other cultural heavy hitters, with the music of singer-songwriter and liberal activist Jason Isbell featured in multiple episodes and the magazine Bitter Southerner providing creative. The show is being produced and financed by Left/Right Productions, which produced The Circus (as well as Mob Wives).
Long Play, however, is not meant to chronicle the week in politics like The Circus did. Instead, as its name suggests, it will take a longer view about the forces shaping each state.
Palmieri said she feels more optimism than many of her peers about the potential for new coalitions and fresh forms of unity, no matter recent evidence suggesting widening rifts even within political parties.
The comms veteran says what can look like a divide may just be confusion - confusion that a political show could help address.
"We think the country is very divided but that's not what's happening in my opinion," she said. "Look at Republicans. Because Trump is not an ideological conservative a lot of people don't know where to go after he's gone. So it's really a jump ball."
Palmieri isn't trying to prescribe partisan strategy, though she realizes the kind of information Long Play provides can be used in that way. She also understands that all three of the principals are Democrats (Landrieu was also the infrastructure implementation coordinator under Biden) but says she believes that people will tune in from across the spectrum.
For all the ways politics pervades modern life, political deep-dives on television are actually rare, reduced to the occasional documentary or longform cable news piece. Still, the extent of viewer appetite at a time when social media algorithms feed political info (and outrage) 24/7 remains to be seen.
Palmieri continues a trend of high-profile ex-White House officials establishing a place in the political news firmament - a trend that extends from Obama advisor David Axelrod on CNN to Trump first-term figures Kayleigh McEnany and Larry Kudlow on Fox News to Joseph Biden comms chief Jen Psaki on MS Now. Palmieri thinks this pattern isn't accidental.
"There's so much noise and so people are hungry for inside information," she said. "With Mitch and Erinn, that's what we'll try to do."
