Audiences first met Petiri Reed on Issa Rae’s Sweet Life: Los Angeles on HBO Max. Now he’s back, in a very different chapter of his life, with a new docu-series called (P)ivot, which premiered its first episode on YouTube on August 2, with new episodes following weekly.
The title comes from a moment Reed didn’t see coming. He’d sat in on an entrepreneurship panel called Power of the Pivot, surrounded by friends who’d already made the full leap out of corporate life, and found himself, in his own words, “half in, half out.”
Two weeks later, his manager put an unusual meeting on his calendar, and he learned he was being transitioned out of his Wall Street job. “There’s just no way that I sat on a panel called Power to Pivot and now I’m in a position where I’m forced to,” Reed told The Quinessential Gentleman in a recent interview. Rather than sit with that irony privately, he decided to film it.
(P)ivot picks up from there, following Reed as a new father, an influencer, and an entrepreneur trying to figure out what comes next, all while showing the parts of the journey that never made it onto the HBO Max screen. It’s not just about the career pivot, either. Reed is one of seven siblings raised by a single mother, and the series digs into that family dynamic alongside his current relationships with his “Off the Grid” guys.
It also gets into dating as a new father, where the stakes look different than they used to. “The next step after a couple of dates is, like, are you an eligible person to potentially meet my son in the future,” Reed said, describing the shift in how he approaches it all now that he’s building a family, not just a life.
This is the future. With the rise of the streaming world, where people are already sharing their lives on screen, we’re going to see that evolve into people documenting their lives for audiences to watch in real time. Petiri’s first episode sets that tone early, showing exactly where he is right now: just got fired, has a child, and trying to figure it out. It’s relatable and it’s real, with Reed not hiding from the L’s he’s taken, putting them on screen for everyone to see instead of only showing the highlight reel.
If you’re grinding right now and trying to make something of yourself, this is a great watch. (P)ivot is streaming now on YouTube, with new episodes dropping weekly. Check out the premiere episode below.
