Conversion Therapy Podcast ‘Dear Alana’ Leads Tenderfoot TV Slate Alongside Weekly Series & Spinoffs
17.07.2023 - 15:41
/ deadline.com
EXCLUSIVE: Tenderfoot TV, the podcast company behind series such as To Live and Die in LA and Up and Vanished, is expanding its slate.
The company has unveiled a raft of new series, including Dear Alana, a dual-narrative series created by Simon Kent Fung about the life and tragic death of devout youth Alana Chen, whose aspiration to become a nun led her to conversion therapy, and a number of weekly series and spinoffs of existing shows.
Dear Alana is an eight-episode series that sees Kent Fung explore the psychological theories behind conversion therapy today, as he goes behind the scenes of an ascendant brand of American Catholicism sweeping college campuses now, and unearths the complicated boundary between earnest faith and spiritual manipulation, the promise of perfection and the price we pay to belong. It features Chen’s extensive journals, which reveal her hidden struggles with her sexuality and faith. Chen died, aged 24, in Boulder, after being hospitalized for depression. The series will launch in August.
Elsewhere, there are spinoffs of Up and Vanished, To Live and Die in LA and Culpable as well as a weekly talk spinoff of Radio Rental, Rattled & Shook, which is hosted by Meredith Stedman and Aprile Ruha that has launched.
Talking To Death sees Tenderfoot co-founder Payne Lindsey take off his investigative hat for a new role as weekly host of his first true crime talk show. The series will see guests talk to him about death and delve into crime, life and mystery. It launches in September and is produced in partnership with iHeartMedia.
The Estate, which launches in September, asks what happens when a Mexican man, a Black man and an Italian man start a business in 1970’s Stockton, CA? One of them ends up