PARTNERS marks a milestone in Shutterstock Studios’ growing project slate, which spans commercial production, branded content, and premium documentary programming across TV, film and social.

Shutterstock, Inc.

For a large part of the last year and a half, a documentary series team from Shutterstock Studios trailed the players and the Professional Pickleball Association tour, capturing both on-the-court and behind-the-scenes footage and interviews of players, executives, journalists, and other persons in the orbit of professional pickleball.

The trailer for the end result of their work dropped yesterday, and it looks amazing.

Click here for the Partners trailer on YouTube.

The show will be called “Partners” and, per the show’s executive producer Mark Infante the show “tiptoes the line between a traditional sports documentary series and a reality show." Sports documentaries in this ilk are quite popular at present, with a slew of Netflix series available that cover sports like F1 (Drive to Survive), Tennis (Break Point), the NBA (Starting 5), the PGA (Full Swing), and Cycling (Tour de France Unchained). These shows document the world these athletes live in and cover both their professional and personal challenges. In some cases (especially with Formula 1 domestically) these shows are credited with drastically improving the popularity amongst audiences that would not have been exposed to the sport otherwise. Partners aims to do the same.

At first glance, this trailer looks fantastic. The high-quality footage shown includes the expected clips of the PPA tour players in action, but it also dives into the personal lives of the pros as they travel around. The word “traveling circus” is used frequently in the trailer to describe the tour, and that’s also a description I’ve used frequently to describe how the tour (and its players) operate. The interviews interspersed with the clips are slick and well done, and the action shots look slick and well produced. For those whose entire video experience of the PPA is via PickleballTV coverage and from end-court video angles, this will be an amazing new look at the sport.

The six-part docuseries will premier on May 5, 2026, on Prime Video, the PPA Tour YouTube channel, and PickleballTV. We’ll hopefully get screeners and will cover the release of the series in real time.

Disclosure: I was interviewed by the production team for the making of this documentary series in July 2025 and may appear in the series.