On the heels of Apple selecting A Slight Change of Plans as the Best Show of the Year 2021, documentary production house The Cinemart is partnering with Dr. Maya Shankar and Pushkin Industries, the audio company co-founded by Malcolm Gladwell, to adapt their podcast into a premium nonfiction series. Maya Shankar, who served as Senior Advisor in President Barack Obama’s White House, is a cognitive scientist who studies how and why we change.
A Slight Change of Plans which has over 2.6 million downloads and counting, gives an unvarnished look into how people navigate changes of all kinds. Shankar uncovers little-known personal stories and reflections from familiar names—such as Tiffany Haddish, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Riz Ahmed and Kacey Musgraves—as well as from real-life inspirations, like a young man who builds cancer detection tools and who finds himself in the throes of his own stage 4 diagnosis, a Black jazz musician who convinced hundreds of KKK members to leave the Klan, along with her own personal story of change which happened earlier this year. Shankar’s willingness to open up to listeners, combined with her insightful, intimate, and authentic storytelling style has resulted in a listenership that is just as dedicated to her as to her guests and their stories.
Now with numerous fans from all over the world writing to her and sharing their own deeply personal change stories, Shankar will travel the world to connect with real-life people in the midst of impactful life changes. This elevated, genre-bending format will meld humanism and science with a narrated docufollow approach by taking Shankar into the hearts, minds, and worlds of everyday people and influential change-makers alike. Shankar will also visit with other notables and celebrities, who will open up about how they navigated and learned from their own similar changes in largely untold stories.
Maya Shankar will host, write and executive produce A Slight Change of Plans with Pushkin Industries, and Malcolm Gladwell and Pushkin CEO Jacob Weisberg will serve as Executive Producers. The series will be helmed by The Cinemart, with Julia Willoughby Nason, Jenner Furst and Michael Gasparro executive producing. The Cinemart has become a best-in-class disruptor in premium nonfiction and the Emmy-nominated, Peabody award-winning production company has produced groundbreaking events and series for over half a billion viewers globally. Their recent true-comedy LuLaRich for Amazon Prime Video artfully exposed the perils of multi-level marketing, pop-feminism and patriarchy and has quickly became one of the biggest docuseries of 2021 since premiering in September.
A Slight Change of Plans is projected to debut in Q4 of 2022 and the project is represented by Hannah Epstein and Carly Fromm at CAA.
