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Bleacher Report Renews Digital Series ‘Take It There With Taylor Rooks’ For Second Season

Dade Hayes

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EXCLUSIVE: WarnerMedia-owned Bleacher Report has renewed digital series Take it There with Taylor Rooks for a second season.

The show, which streams on YouTube and on the Bleacher Report site and app, featured sit-downs with NBA players Jimmy Butler and Damian Lilllard and NFL running back Saquon Barkley.

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Season 2, which premieres February 12, will feature interviews with NBA stars Kevin Durant, Trae Young and Chris Paul.

The most popular episode of the show’s first season featured Ja Morant. Then a top college player at Murray State, Morant is now a breakout rookie with the NBA’s Memphis Grizzlies. It had 3 million total video views and nearly 300,000 social engagements.

Interviews on the show often feature behind-the-scenes elements like players’ homes, back yards or basketball courts, mixing in personal and lifestyle topics along with straightforward sports themes. On the episode featuring Morant, he and Rooks hit golf balls at a Florida driving range, a suggestion by Morant even though he admitted to not knowing how to play golf.

Overall, the first season racked up more than 20 million total video views and nearly 1.5 million social engagements, with 78% of YouTube traffic coming from viewers under the age of 35. The show was one of Bleacher Report’s first series to air on Instagram’s emerging IGTV platform, surpassing 1 million views per episode there.

Rooks also does on-camera work for Turner and previously was at SportsNet New York and the Big Ten Network.

Bleacher Report, whose sizable digital assets have been woven into those of Turner Sports over the past several years, also operates streaming service B/R Live. Parent WarnerMedia is also vowing to put live sports programming (along with news) on its forthcoming service HBO Max a year after its May launch.

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