Houston Astros Cheating Scandal Docuseries From LeBron James’ Uninterrupted Coming to Quibi

By Will Thorne

LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – Quibi and LeBron James’ Uninterrupted sports media company are teaming up for a new docuseries about a cheating scandal that has gone down in baseball infamy.

The short-form content platform has ordered “Sign Language” (working title), a series which aims to give viewers an inside look at the Houston Astros sign stealing scandal and its unprecedented fallout.

Per the logline for the series, it will look to “transcend the baseball diamond to explore larger themes of greed, cheating, corruption, sportsmanship, and social media activism.” News of the series comes around two months after it was announced that “Slow Burn” producers Leon Neyfakh and Andrew Parsons are looking to hit a home run with a podcast about the Astros’ controversial World Series-winning 2017 season, which they then intend to adapt into a scripted series.

“Sign Language” also hails from investigative filmmaking company The Cinemart, which last year released the Hulu doc “Fyre Fraud” about the infamous Fyre Festival debacle in the Bahamas. The series intends to leverage Uninterrupted’s podcast “R2C2” with CC Sabathia and Ryan Ruocco and the company’s access to top athletes and sports reporters to create the definitive doc about the scandal that rocked America’s pastime.

Maverick Carter, who co-founded Uninterrupted with LeBron James, is executive producing alongside Jamal Henderson, Philip Byron and Jason Stein. Julia Willoughby Nason and Jenner Furst are directing the series, as well as exec producing with Michael Gasparro for Cinemart.

Quibi, which launched back in early April, was in the headlines earlier this week when its founder Jeffrey Katzenberg blamed its underwhelming subscriber count so far on the coronavirus in a New York times interview.