Jennifer Palmieri was hurrying through the Atlanta airport the other day on her way to Laredo, Texas, when she stopped for a quick reflection. “I mean, the world comes through here,” she said by phone. “Why wouldn’t you try to understand?”
That question is at the heart of Palmieri’s latest project, an ambitious effort to help television viewers better understand the political South. The former White House communications director under Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign communications chief has teamed with Crooked Media on a six-part documentary series called Long Play, which launches Monday and will live on YouTube.
The series is designed to explore deeper forces and regional shifts that daily news coverage often misses. Palmieri is joined by former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu and veteran journalist and The 19th editor-at-large Errin Haines as co-hosts, each bringing a different perspective to the nonfiction show.
A deeper look at the South
Crooked Media, co-founded by former Obama speechwriter and Palmieri colleague Jon Favreau, will executive produce Long Play and help market and distribute it. The show is produced and financed by production company Left/Right, which has also produced The Circus and Mob Wives.
Palmieri believes the series could offer a remedy for what she sees as a gap in 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 capture that complexity, the trio will use their Rolodexes to get powerful people to talk, while also attending rallies, interviewing voters and generally showing the story from the ground up.
Georgia first, then more states
Georgia power players Jon Osoff, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Latasha Brown of Black Voters Matter have already been interviewed for the debut Georgia episode, which will hit online Monday. 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 still to be determined.
Why the project matters
“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.) He added in an email that “you cannot understand America and our politics today without understanding the south. It’s not a monolith, and it never was.” Haines said in an email that “As a journalist, I’ve spent my career covering the people and communities too often left out of our national political conversation, and many of those stories begin in the south.”
Producers have also brought on 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.
Long Play is not meant to track the week-by-week political churn the way The Circus did. Instead, as the title suggests, it will take a longer view of the forces shaping each state.
A political audience hungry for context
Palmieri said she feels more optimism than many of her peers about the possibility of new coalitions and fresh forms of unity, even as evidence continues to suggest widening rifts within political parties.
The communications veteran argues that what often looks like division may really be confusion — the kind of confusion a political series could help untangle.
“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 is not trying to prescribe partisan strategy, though she acknowledges that the information Long Play provides could be used that way. She also recognizes that the three principals are Democrats, with Landrieu having also served as the infrastructure implementation coordinator under Biden, but says she believes viewers across the spectrum will tune in.
Political deep-dives remain relatively rare on television, usually appearing only as the occasional documentary or longform cable news segment. Whether audiences want a slower, more detailed approach at a time when social media algorithms deliver political information — and outrage — around the clock remains to be seen.
Palmieri’s project also fits a broader trend of prominent former White House officials becoming fixtures in the political news landscape, from Obama adviser David Axelrod on CNN to Trump first-term figures Kayleigh McEnany and Larry Kudlow on Fox News to Joseph Biden communications chief Jen Psaki on MS Now. Palmieri says that development is no accident.
“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.”
