The Brine is a documentary series from Sour Pickles TV that investigates history’s strangest, most overlooked stories — preserved for your enjoyment.
Scroll down to learn more about our studio's newest project.
S1E1 — Out Now
EP 2 — In Pre-Production
Why We Make It
For us, The Brine is a labor of love. It represents the realization of one of Leigh’s biggest creative aspirations: to become a documentary filmmaker. Before Sour Pickles TV became what it is today, Leigh went to film school for documentary filmmaking and dreamed of telling richly researched, character-driven stories in the tradition of filmmakers like Ken Burns. With The Brine, that dream is finally coming true.
NEW DOCU-SERIES
What is The Brine?
Part mission statement, part comedy routine: Leigh on why The Brine exists and where it’s headed.
S1E1 — Out Now
The Prohibition-Era Gangster Who Brought Hockey to New York
“Big” Bill Dwyer was a rum-running kingpin whose Prohibition fortune helped bring professional hockey to New York. A little-known piece of the city’s sports history, at the crossroads of crime, ambition, showmanship, and forgotten local legends.
In 1954, psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham published Seduction of the Innocent, the book that helped ignite a national panic over comic books — and led to Senate hearings, the Comics Code Authority, and one of the most consequential acts of pop-cultural censorship in American history. But this isn’t just about one book. It’s about a recurring American ritual: adults discover a new form of youth culture, decide it’s dangerous, and campaign to protect children from it. Comics. Horror movies. Rock. Rap. Video games. The internet. Episode 2 investigates what happens when scientific language gives moral panic the appearance of objective truth.
With Episode 2, we want to investigate what Seduction of the Innocent reveals about art, fear, childhood, censorship, and the lengths society goes to when it feels like it is losing control.
We’ll map the rise of comic books as mass entertainment, the moral anxieties of postwar America, the Senate hearings on juvenile delinquency, the creation of the Comics Code Authority, and the long shadow those events cast over generations of artists and readers.
What was Wertham actually arguing? Where was he right to be concerned? Where did his conclusions become distorted, exaggerated, or absurd? How did psychiatry become a weapon in a cultural battle over children’s imaginations? And what happens when scientific language is used to give moral panic the appearance of objective truth?
Follow the investigation.
Production updates on Episode 2 land in the newsletter first.