Pushkin Revives ‘Heavyweight’ In New Fall Slate; iHeart Partnership Renewed.

Longform audio is alive and well. That’s the message from Pushkin Industries as it announces a new fall slate of programming, including the return of the Heavyweight podcast series in its first season under the Pushkin banner and a new season of co-founder Malcom Gladwell’s Revisionist History.

“This new slate of podcasts showcases the passion we have at Pushkin for the power of creative and premium audio storytelling,” CEO Gretta Cohn says. “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 announcement of the new slate of series comes as Pushkin says it has renewed its partnership with iHeartMedia. Originally announced in November 2020, the renewed deal will see iHeart continuing to serve as the exclusive sales and distribution partner for Pushkin Industries podcasts. Pushkin and iHeartMedia will also co-produce new projects as part of the partnership with additional shows to be announced.

“Five years ago, we were thrilled to partner with Malcom Gladwell and the team at Pushkin Industries, knowing that our platforms coming together would lead to innovation in a still-emerging field,” said Will Pearson, President of iHeartPodcasts. “We’re so proud of what we’ve built together and as podcast listening continues to explode, we’re delighted to extend our partnership and create even more fantastic shows together.”

The lineup of shows that iHeart will be distributing grew earlier this year when Jonathan Goldstein announced the Heavyweight podcast, launched in 2016 by Gimlet Media, would stage a comeback at Pushkin Industries after the cult favorite was cancelled in 2023 by Spotify in a series of cost-cutting moves. The result is a 10-episode weekly series that will take listeners with Goldstein for road trips, thorny reunions, and difficult conversations as Pushkin says he will backpedal his way into the past like a therapist with a time machine. It launches Sept. 18.

While seasonal, documentary-style shows have fallen out of vogue in favor of year-round podcasts, often with a cheap-to-produce interview format, Pushkin says it continues to see an opening for the kinds of shows that podcasting has long been known for. That includes Gladwell’s latest season of Revisionist History, set to debut Oct. 2.

The new season, titled “The Alabama Murders,” takes a deep dive into the story of Charles Sennett, an Alabama Church of Christ minister who was having an affair with a parishioner and, rather than facing the shame of divorcing his wife Elizabeth, hired three men to kill her. This decision would lead to unexpected consequences that would trickle down for decades, including the botched execution of one of the hitmen. Pushkin says 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.

Set to debut next week is the new season of Leon Neyfakh’s Fiasco podcast. This season takes 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 debuts Sept. 8.

Pushkin will also debut a six-episode limited series on Sept. 16 called The Chinatown Sting. Host Lidia Jean Kott and co-reporter Shuyu Wang tell the story of a group of women connected through the mahjong parlors in Manhattan’s Chinatown, who were caught in a massive undercover drug bust that turned out to be the tip of something bigger. The series features interviews with sources who have never spoken on record before — including witnesses, defendants and federal prosecutors — to reconstruct a case that still has repercussions today.

Also coming Oct. 14, Pushkin will re-release Michael Lewis’s best-selling book “The Big Short” as an audiobook, narrated by the author for the first time. In addition, Lewis is set to host a companion series on his podcast Against the Rules exploring how the events detailed in the book led to what we see happening in U.S. politics more than a decade later. The audiobook and podcast release comes as the film adaptation, which stars Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt, celebrates its 10th anniversary. “The Big Short” famously explores the causes of the 2008 financial crash and those that realized it was happening well before the rest of the world.

Pushkin Industries’ fall 2025 programming will also bring new episodes from their library of shows, which includes The Happiness Lab, Cautionary Tales, Broken Record, A Slight Change of Plans, Risky Business, What's Your Problem?