Nancy Glass, who runs Glass Entertainment Group, the company behind Netflix doc Bitconned, started a podcast business in 2021.
Since then, she has produced a dozen audio series and has turned a number of them into true-crime television series and is shopping a few more.
Titles such as Betrayal, Burden of Guilt and Curse of America’s Next Top Model have all been turned into docuseries.
Betrayal has aired five seasons as a podcast; the first season documents Jenifer Faison’s shattered marriage to Spencer Herron, a respected educator revealed as a sexual predator, season two follows Ashley Lytton’s fight for justice against a predator close to home and season three sees Stacey Rutherford discover her husband, Dr. Justin Rutherford, harbors dark secrets, shattering her perfect image of him.
Glass and ABC News Studios have turned three of these into television docuseries; Betrayal: The Perfect Husband, Betrayal: A Father’s Secret and Betrayal: Under His Eye.
Paramount+ adapted Burden of Guilt into a three-part series from Glass and See It Now Studios. The series follows a woman’s quest to solve the mystery of what or who really killed her 4-month-old baby brother.
E! turned Curse of America’s Next Top Model into Dirty Rotten Scandals: America’s Next Top Model, the latest doc to make allegations about the Tyra Banks-hosted reality series.
Next up, Glass is pitching streamers on three new titles; Love Trapped, The Crimes of Margo Freshwater and the second season of Burden of Guilt.
Love Trapped is an investigative series that features Clayton Echard, star of season 18 of The Bachelorette and season 26 of The Bachelor and his hosted by Stephani Young. Launched last month, the ten-part audio series tells the story of how Echard was thrown into a bogus paternity situation.
The Crimes of Margo Freshwater tells the story of Freshwater, who when she was 18 fell in with a much older man, and together they blazed through a two-week long crime spree that ended with her sentenced to 99 years for murder. Then she escaped from prison and vanished for the next three decades.
“Podcasting has been enormously valuable for us and has played a meaningful role in the growth of our company. We took a risk and kept the process entirely in-house, building it from the ground up,” Glass told Deadline. “The success of the podcasts has also given us a powerful incubator for television.”
Glass Podcasts has found huge numbers for these podcasts, totaling over 150M downloads in the last five years over 12 series, many remaining in Apple’s podcast charts for weeks.
However, the roots of this division are unusual. Glass said that she came across a story that she thought would work well as an audio play, having previously worked in radio.
“I went into our business office and asked if anyone wanted to work with me on a podcast. That wasn’t a random act, our business office has always been full of creative thinkers, and I wanted people who would not be hung up on the visual,” she said.
Gunning is now the host of Betrayal and head of podcast production and development and Fetterman is head of podcast strategy and development.
“I know that was risky, but something told me it would work,” she added. “Ben, Andrea and I spend a great deal of time thinking about the stories that resonate with us and how to tell them in the most compelling way possible.”