On Monday, the comedian Marc Maron said that he would be ending his podcast, which has been running since 2009. I have been listening to Maron’s delightfully surly interview show, “WTF With Marc Maron,” since its early days. In the year 2025 it is hard to believe that a comedian interviewing other comedians could feel utterly fresh and transgressive, but I swear that it once did.
Maron has described creating the podcast as a Hail Mary. He had just divorced his second wife and lost his radio job on the failing Air America network. Maron told New York magazine’s Jada Yuan in 2012, “I had nothing. My manager had hung me out to dry. I was barely solvent. It was sort of like, How do I not die broke?”
That year — 2012 — was a difficult one for me. I found out I was pregnant on my second day of work at a new, challenging job, and within another two weeks was so sick I could barely leave the bathroom. I ended up quitting because I simply could not do it, and I didn’t know when I would feel better. When I could finally hold down food six months into my pregnancy, I would waddle through my neighborhood, listening to Maron work through his neuroses and challenge his guests to do the same.
The podcast made me feel as if, even though I was unemployed and depressed, I could also come back from career humiliation in a way that could be creatively satisfying, and that one day I would be able to talk about it without shame. I wasn’t sure how it would look or how long it might take, only that it was possible.
What always set “WTF” apart from other audio interview shows was Maron’s vulnerability and presence. The podcast tends to open with a long rant from Maron, which feels like he’s opening up his brain and inviting the audience to peer into the jumble: his relationship angst, the high jinks of his beloved feral cats, his creative struggles, his petty grievances, his grief over a partner, the director Lynn Shelton, who died suddenly and too young.
That openness always extended to his guests, which tended to provoke from them genuine and unexpected responses. The comedian Todd Glass came out publicly on the pod in 2012, and my personal favorite moment was when Ali Wong pumped breast milk on air in 2016.
Since Maron announced that the last “WTF” show will be in the fall, write-ups of his podcast retirement have mentioned the greatest hits. They almost always bring up when he interviewed Barack Obama from his dumpy garage in 2015, or when he had a revealing and beautiful conversation with Robin Williams in 2010 that was ultimately chosen by the Library of Congress to be part of the National Recording Registry. But to me, the mere existence of the podcast is in itself special. It provided inspiration for me in the darkest time of my personal and professional life.
Three years into the podcast, Maron was still mostly interviewing comedians. He was working on an autobiographical TV show, which would air on IFC from 2013 to 2016, but the podcast was still somewhat niche. As the audience and his fame grew over time, Maron stayed true to his vision, which was showing humanity and grace.
He spoke often of his own hard-won sobriety and held himself accountable for moments of casual cruelty, which opened the floor for other people to talk about their lowest times. (A lot of the early episodes started with the other person telling Maron, “I used to think you were a jerk” or “I used to think you hated me,” and they’d unpack from there.) But some of the magic was gone for me as a listener when his show became another stop on press tours for actors like Nicole Kidman and Noah Wyle.
That’s not to say Maron’s skill as an interviewer diminished — far from it. It’s just that, as Tina Fey once said on another podcast, “authenticity is dangerous and expensive.” Movie stars have, by contrast, been media trained so thoroughly that they view being their true selves as a risk. Few celebrities are able to fully go there in the way Maron could with his first guests, when there was less at stake.
It was a different media environment in the early Obama era, when Maron started his show. The looming threat of cancellation didn’t lurk over every spicy exchange. The social media clip economy, where every podcast interaction has to be packaged for short-form consumption, didn’t exist. While Maron has shown himself to be highly adaptable to new mediums — for a while during the pandemic, he was doing Instagram Live broadcasts that he described as “a morning show from my porch every day” — I can understand why he might want to move on from the podcast grind in this moment, and why he feels “burnt out” from the whole thing.
I have no doubt that Maron will continue to do work that feels right to him. No matter how big his audience got, he maintained control over the product, working with the same producer, Brendan McDonald, for all 16 years.
In a world where authenticity is indeed dangerous and expensive, Maron knows that it’s still worth it to stay real.
End Notes
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I didn’t watch “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” as a kid, but the documentary “Pee-wee as Himself,” about Paul Reubens, Pee-wee’s creator and alter ego, is so good that it doesn’t matter. Matt Wolf, who directed the documentary, which is now airing on HBO Max, has an incredible essay in Vulture about his experience working with the mercurial Reubens. Reubens, a difficult and evasive guy in the best of circumstances, almost destroyed the documentary by walking away. Wolf’s sensitivity to his subjects (he has also directed documentaries about the activist Bayard Rustin and the illustrator Hilary Knight) shines through always.
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I’m often in search of the most comfortable possible sandal because I am a Brooklyn mom. I have been eyeing these Tevas for years because I know that Mary-Kate Olsen has worn them, and I am easily influenced. I have the platform version. They are ridiculously comfortable, even though I haven’t figured out how to walk in them without making a gentle slapping sound so everybody knows I’m coming.
Feel free to drop me a line about anything here.
Jessica Grose is an Opinion writer for The Times, covering family, religion, education, culture and the way we live now.
The post Marc Maron’s Podcast Helped Me See a Creative Future appeared first on New York Times.
