‘Heavyweight,' an Acclaimed Narrative Podcast, Returns
Almost nine years ago, a Minneapolis writer revealed a family skeleton to a podcast host.
Steve Marsh had a 'secret sister' — an older sibling his parents had placed for adoption before they were married, when they were not ready to raise a child. He wanted help finding her.
Luckily for Mr. Marsh, his thorny problem fit neatly into the premise of a new podcast: 'Heavyweight' was dedicated to ultra-personal quests, confronting regrets and healing resentments. It was hosted by Jonathan Goldstein, a longtime audio journalist who blanketed the show's vulnerability in dry humor.
'This conceit of having this nervous Jewish fellow who has to insert himself into the most sensitive parts in people's lives — it's just entertaining,' said Mr. Marsh, whose episode took almost three years to produce, as (spoiler alert) his family contacted and got to know his sister.
'Heavyweight' was an early hit, reaching No. 1 on Apple Podcasts shortly after its 2016 debut and earning wide critical acclaim. A co-host of the 'Longform' podcast called it 'one of the most compelling and moving things that anyone puts out in media anywhere.'
The podcast was canceled by Spotify in 2023, as the audio giant made significant company layoffs. And as more time passed after the final episode of 'Heavyweight' — about stoic twin brothers tracking down their deceased younger brother's pet parrot — it seemed more unlikely the show would return.
But on Tuesday, the media company Pushkin Industries, co-founded by Malcolm Gladwell, announced that 'Heavyweight' had joined its podcast network and would release new episodes this year.
Pushkin's investment is a bet that narrative audio can still win audiences' hearts, even in a landscape now crowded with year-round interview shows. Though documentary storytelling thrived in the early 2010s, led by 'This American Life' and 'Radiolab,' today the most popular and influential podcasts are lengthy (and easier to produce) interview programs, many released as videos. Some are very lucrative: Alex Cooper, Joe Rogan and the Kelce brothers have turned their chat shows into diversified media empires.
'I listen to a lot of interview shows myself,' Mr. Goldstein said. 'I just feel like there should be a different name. It's unfortunate that they all fall under the banner of 'podcasts,' because what we're doing is more documentary.'
Pushkin's deal with 'Heavyweight' does not resemble the kind of eye-popping contracts that make headlines when a top podcaster sells off rights to advertising and distribution, with figures exceeding $100 million or $200 million.
Rather it involves making Mr. Goldstein and his two longtime producers full-time employees of Pushkin, with benefits and access to technical, research, legal and operations support. (Advertising and distribution for Pushkin's shows are supported by iHeartPodcasts.)
While the deal includes standard revenue-sharing agreements, there was no large advance check cut to Mr. Goldstein, said Gretta Cohn, chief executive of Pushkin. She characterized the arrangement as 'unique' and declined to disclose the show's budget.
Mr. Goldstein, now 55 and based in Minneapolis, created 'Heavyweight' with Gimlet Media, a narrative-focused podcast company founded in Brooklyn that Spotify acquired for $230 million in early 2019 — a boom era for podcasts.
By 2023, Spotify's podcasting division underwent a 'strategic realignment' as the advertising market faltered. The company laid off 200 people and folded Gimlet into Spotify Studios. Later that year, 'Heavyweight,' which had expanded from focusing on Mr. Goldstein and his circle of family and friends to his listeners, was canceled.
Over the next year, Mr. Goldstein spoke to several companies in his search for a new home for 'Heavyweight,' he said — major networks but also, at one point, The Washington Post.
While the show has an eager fan base (on Reddit, listeners still swap their 'teariest' episodes), it is complicated to produce, Mr. Goldstein said. Fewer than half of all story leads become full episodes, he said, and each unfolds on a different timetable. 'Heavyweight' hinges on the emotional stakes of confrontation and resolution, which are difficult to capture if, for example, the confronted party refuses to cooperate.
Mr. Goldstein said he had briefly considered a subscriber-supported option, like Patreon, but found he lacked interest in running an independent business.
He first met Ms. Cohn last year at South by Southwest. An Apple Podcasts executive introduced them at the iHeartPodcast Awards, where Mr. Goldstein was being honored, and where they 'sneakily' watched the actor Kyle MacLachlan tear up a dance floor, Ms. Cohn said. Pushkin did not make an offer until months later.
'The shows are investigative, but they're so intimate,' Ms. Cohn said. 'When you think of investigation, you might think of crime or hard news. He's taking that style and that depth of craft but applying it to human relationships.'
Pushkin will benefit financially from the 'Heavyweight' podcast's back catalog and intellectual property potential, Ms. Cohn added. But 'Heavyweight' will also be expected to produce more content. Pushkin anticipates releasing a full 10-episode season late in 2025, after some less intensive episodes this spring.
Some of those shorter installments may involve follow-ups of past episodes — like the story of Gregor, a friend of Mr. Goldstein's who carried a yearslong grudge against the musician Moby. Mr. Goldstein said he had also recorded some audio during the hiatus about his experience quitting drinking.
'There was a time when I felt like 'Heavyweight' would release six episodes per year and then kind of call it a day,' Ms. Cohn said. 'That just is not a possibility at this point.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
3 hours ago
A debut novel explores family relationships and cultural displacement
In her debut novel, Misophonia, Dana Vowinckel explores the cultural diaspora through one teenager's summer across Berlin, Jerusalem, and Chicago. It's a coming of age story that balances the narratives of a daughter and her father as well as the fifteen-year-old protagonist's abrupt (and reluctant) reunion with her mother. The book is also a semi-autobiographical trek through parts of Vowinckel's own life. Born in Berlin into an American-Jewish-German family, the author grew up between Chicago and Berlin and her novel manages to capture the sometimes awkward, oftentimes tender, dynamics of a family pulled across continents and histories. Though it explores the travails of teenage girlhood, the book also delves into the nuances of being Jewish and German and the challenges of reconciliation when your goals and feelings collide with world events. 'Language is at the core of the book, not identity,' Vowinckel explained in a recent interview in New York. 'It would be a mistake to read it as purely an identity novel,' she says. Critics have praised the novel for its rich, contrasting ingredients and Vowinckel's ability to narrate the emotions of its teenage protagonist with warmth and clarity. The book won the Mara Cassens Prize, a German literary award given annually for the best German debut novel, and earned Vowinckel the literature prize of the Association of Arts and Culture of the German Economy. It was also shortlisted for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize which celebrates outstanding new publications written in German. The 27-year old Vowinckel, who studied linguistics and literature in Berlin, Toulouse and Cambridge, was in New York to promote the recently published English translation of Misophonia by HarperVia. (The book was translated from its original German by Adrian Nathan West.) Vowinckel's visit included events at Germany's Consulate General of New York - which promotes cultural, intellectual, and artistic exchanges with Germany - and Deutsches Haus at New York University. Misophonia opens in Chicago, with parts set in Berlin and Israel. It follows a teenage protagonist, Margarita, as she travels to her father's birthplace in Israel with the mother who left her when she was a toddler. Margarita shares a special bond with her father, Avi - a doting Israeli who is a cantor at their local synagogue - ever since her mother, Marsha, abandoned the family. Eventually, arrangements are made - without Margarita's knowledge - for her to meet Marsha in Israel before returning to Germany. Blindsided, she wants no part of this overdue reconciliation with a mother she hardly knows. Meanwhile, in Germany, Avi tries to fill the hole left by Margarita's absence with a trip of his own, embarking on a personal journey, both hope-inducing and despairing. Writing the book through the prism of dueling narratives - switching between a teenage girl, and her father - allowed Vowinckel to engage readers in an unusual point-of-view combination, she says. Accounts of Jewish congregational life in Berlin are mixed with detailed descriptions of the awkwardness and lust that go along with living inside a female teenage body. 'Both perspectives were very interesting to me,' Vowinckel told the Chicago Review of Books in May. 'With a 15-year-old, there's early sexuality and kind of being lost in the world, contrasted with the very lonely, quiet life of Avi,' she said. Straddling the two narratives also helped balance the exploration of imperfect family relationships and larger cultural displacement, the author says. 'I think it was very helpful for me to have a protagonist with a very specific job description because that gives you rhythm to the text,' Vowinckel says. 'It made it very easy for me to start this big novel project with this very calm, laconic voice, and then mix it with Margarita.'
Los Angeles Times
7 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
Hugh Jackman brings jokes, drama and John Denver to opening night at the Hollywood Bowl
Strumming a black acoustic guitar to match his black tuxedo pants and jacket, Hugh Jackman strolled onto the stage of the Hollywood Bowl and let the audience know precisely what it was in for. 'Little bit of Neil Diamond,' he said as the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra revved up the go-go self-improvement jive of 'Crunchy Granola Suite.' A dedicated student of showbiz history, the Australian singer and actor was starting his concert Saturday night just as Diamond did half a century ago at the Greek Theatre gig famously captured on his classic 'Hot August Night' LP. Yet Diamond was just one of the flamboyant showmen Jackman aspired to emulate as he headlined the opening night of the Bowl's 2025 season. Later in the concert, the 56-year-old sang a medley of tunes by Peter Allen, the Australian songwriter and Manhattan bon vivant whom Jackman portrayed on Broadway in 2003 in 'The Boy From Oz.' And then there was P.T. Barnum, whose career as a maker of spectacle inspired the 2017 blockbuster 'The Greatest Showman,' which starred Jackman as Barnum and spawned a surprise-hit soundtrack that went quadruple-platinum. 'There's 17,000 of you, and if any of you did not see 'The Greatest Showman,' you might be thinking right now: This guy is super-confident,' Jackman told the crowd, panting ever so slightly after he sang the movie's title song, which has more than 625 million streams on Spotify. The success of 'Showman' notwithstanding, Jackman's brand of stage-and-screen razzle-dazzle feels fairly rare in pop music these days among male performers. (The theater-kid moment that helped make 'Wicked' a phenomenon was almost exclusively engineered — and has almost exclusively benefited — women such as Ariana Grande, Cynthia Erivo, Chappell Roan and Laufey.) What makes Jackman's jazz-handing even more remarkable is that to many he's best known as the extravagantly mutton-chopped Wolverine character from the Marvel movies. Before Jackman's performance on Saturday, the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, conducted by Thomas Wilkins, played a brief set of orchestral music that included selections from John Ottman's score for 'X2: X-Men United.' The ascent of Benson Boone, with his mustache and his backflips, suggests that Jackman may yet find inheritors to carry on the tradition he himself was bequeathed by Diamond and the rest. But of course that assumes that Jackman is looking to pass the baton, which was not at all the impression you got from his spirited and athletic 90-minute show at the Bowl. In addition to stuff from 'The Greatest Showman' and a swinging tribute to Frank Sinatra, he did a second Diamond tune — 'Sweet Caroline,' naturally, which he said figures into an upcoming movie in which he plays a Diamond impersonator — and a couple of Jean Valjean's numbers from 'Les Misérables,' which Jackman sang in the 2012 movie adaptation that earned him an Academy Award nomination for lead actor. (With an Emmy, a Grammy and two Tonys to his name, he's an Oscar win away from EGOT status.) For 'You Will Be Found,' from 'Dear Evan Hansen,' he sat down behind a grand piano and accompanied himself for a bit; for the motor-mouthed 'Ya Got Trouble,' from 'The Music Man' — the first show he ever did as a high school kid, he pointed out — he came out into the crowd, weaving among the Bowl's boxes and interacting with audience members as he sang. 'I just saw a lot of friends as I went through,' he said when he returned to the stage. 'Hello, Melissa Etheridge and Linda. Hello, Jess Platt. Hi, Steph, hi, David, hi, Sophia, hi, Orlando — so many friends. Very difficult to say hello to friends and still do that dialogue.' He was panting again, this time more showily. 'It's like 53 degrees and I'm sweating.' The show's comedic centerpiece was a version of John Denver's 'Thank God I'm a Country Boy' that Jackman remade to celebrate his roots as an 'Aussie boy.' There were good-natured jokes about shark attacks and koalas and Margot Robbie, as well as a few pointed political gibes, one about how 'our leaders aren't 100 years old' — 'I'm moving on from that joke fast,' he added — and another that rhymed 'Life down under is really quite fun' with 'I never have to worry: Does that guy have a gun?' The emotional centerpiece, meanwhile, was 'Showman's' 'A Million Dreams,' for which the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra was joined by 18 members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Youth Orchestra Los Angeles. The song itself is pretty cringe, with a lyric bogged down by cliches and a melody you've heard a zillion times before. But Jackman sold its corny idealism with a huckster's sincerity you couldn't help but buy.
New York Times
7 hours ago
- New York Times
Doppelgängers
On This Week's Episode: 'This American Life' got a tip about a meat plant selling pig intestines as fake calamari. The staff members wondered if it could be true and decided to investigate. Fred Armisen joins Ira Glass as co-host for that and other stories of doubles, evil twins and not-so-evil twins. This is a rerun of an episode that first aired in January 2013. New York Times Audio is home to the 'This American Life' archive. Download the app — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.
