Award-Winning Secret Base Premieres Brand New Series Prism

Today, Secret Base, the award-winning SB Nation franchise that focuses on telling smart, captivating, and entertaining sports stories, premiered the first episode of Prism, a brand new documentary series. Prism takes the widely accepted public perception of an athlete or iconic sports personality and holds it up for inspection, exploring the various facets of that perception. Recognizing that the lens we look through can be distorted, Prism makes an effort to better understand the person, where that perception came from, and what other aspects of someone’s history are overlooked.

In the premiere episode, Prism looks at Greg Oden’s career. In the NBA world, if not all of sports, Greg Oden’s name has become synonymous with “bust.” But that perception came about through circumstances far beyond Oden’s control and, as a result, has completely overshadowed why he was the justifiable top pick over Kevin Durant, how his career actually fell apart, and who the human is beneath that label. This episode doesn’t look to rewrite the legacy of Greg Oden but attempts to fully understand why Oden is perceived this way, explores his (now-overlooked) extreme potential, and distinguishes why not all busts are the same.

Additional episodes focus on Aaron Rodgers, Kevin Garnett, Freddy Adu, Anna Kournikova, Peyton Manning, Gregg Popovich, and Kyle Lowry. Episodes are hosted by Secret Base’s Joe Ali, Clara Morris, and Seth Rosenthal, who also created the series in partnership with Michael Das, Ryan Simmons, and the rest of the Secret Base production team. New episodes premiere every Tuesday on Secret Base’s YouTube channel.

Since Secret Base’s inception nearly two years ago, the team of creative video storytellers has aimed to reimagine sports video storytelling. In 2021, the brand’s extensive video slate included two multi-part documentaries, Chosen: A deep rewind of the Cleveland Cavaliers’ 46-year title quest, and a seven-part series led by ASME-award winner Jon Bois titled The History of the Atlanta Falcons. The series earned fan support on Secret Base’s fast-growing YouTube channel as well as critical acclaim; IndieWire wrote, “the brand has reinvented the sports documentary for the digital age”; the New York Times said of Falcons, the series is “so special and refreshing: It’s a wild departure from the talking-heads literalism you’ll find elsewhere.”

More About Secret Base:
Secret Base is an SB Nation franchise that focuses on smart, captivating, entertaining stories that happen to be about sports and finding unconventional ways to tell them. We take community very seriously, inviting our fans to come along with us as we go on various absurd journeys. We recognize that sports are silly, but it’s fun to take silly things seriously, and that’s exactly what we do. As such, we fill a special place in sports media, tapping into a diverse and dedicated fan base across sports lovers and the people who “don’t like sports” alike.

The brand was named a finalist for Digiday’s 2022 Best Video Team of the Year and a finalist for Digiday’s 2021 Media Brand of the Year, while its work has been awarded Webby’s Best Sports Video Series, Seattle Film Critic’s Best Documentary Feature, and was featured on the New York Times’s list of Best TV of 2020.

VIDEO: Greg Oden: the next Bill Russell, the comeback story ... The Bust

Written and produced by Joe Ali; directed by Ryan Simmons; art direction by Michael Das