Back in the early 1990s, Marc Maron lived in San Francisco. A standup who’d already washed out of Los Angeles where working as doorman at the Comedy Store and proximity to Sam Kinison sent him into cocaine psychosis, Maron haunted coffee shops like Muddy Waters and the Philz on 24th Street. To hear his old pal Jack Boulware tell it, Maron was something of a hipster flâneur, bopping from coffee shop to bookstore to wherever else the wind blew people with lots of free time in that cheaper, shaggier city.
These days, Maron is back in LA, sober and quite busy with standup, acting roles, and voice-over work. On most days he can be found at home, sitting across from celebrities, authors, rock stars, and the occasional president, as they talk into mics in his home studio recording WTF, the podcast he launched in September 2009.
As fans of WTF know, Maron is ending his show. When he started, there were only a handful of podcasts out there. As he ends it with 1,684 episodes and counting, there are so many that even a hacky joke about how many there are would fall short.
I’ve been listening to WTF twice a week pretty much since the beginning, back when the Paper of Record wouldn’t even deign to print the show’s name. I can’t even tell you how many iPhones Maron has stuck with me through; he followed me from New York to California, through several job changes; deaths of friends, family members, and a dog; numerous personal milestones; a pandemic; and three presidencies. I’m gonna miss the guy and our weekly one-sided conversations while I walk the new dog, ride BART, or wash dishes.
Does it sound like I consider Maron a friend? Honestly, I do a bit, even though he wasn’t very friendly to me the one time I met him, back in about 2004. We were both in New York then. He was hosting a drive time show called Morning Sedition with Mark Riley on Air America, a short-lived progressive response to right-wing talk radio; I was an editor at Gawker. Maron and Riley’s producer invited me to meet the hosts and see if there was some kind of weekly segment to be done on the show about media gossip.
I don’t remember much of the encounter other than that besides sharing a name, Maron and Riley could not have been more different. Riley, already a veteran DJ and talker, was mellow, measured, and maybe a little disinterested in chatting with a professional blogger (then something of a novelty). Maron was… well, Maron, or at least what I now realize was the early 2000s vintage Maron. He made me feel like if I ever appeared on air, it would be less as a colleague than as a cat toy, something to be batted about and discarded.
I never appeared on air.
“Parasocial relationship” is one of those once-technical terms like “narcissistic personality disorder” that have crept into everyday discourse, largely due to phenomena like podcasting and the rise of social media influencers. It is true, to a large extent, that listeners have come to think of podcasters as friends, even as many of us are feeling less connected to our actual friends. So, yeah, I’m gonna miss my friend Maron.
More than that, though, is that I know Maron will miss his friends. Over the last 16 years, I’ve listened as Maron has learned on air how to be a better friend to the people in his life. The early episodes were structured around a lot of his grievances: the hour in front of the mic was often a chance for him to reconnect with someone he’d fallen out with and try to understand why. Not for nothing, his last question was often “Are we good?” That’s also the title of a new documentary about him.
Listening to those early episodes sometimes felt like eavesdropping on someone undergoing Step Nine in recovery, better known as making amends. Maron is open about the effectiveness of Alcoholics Anonymous in his 20-plus year sobriety, so it was probably second nature for him to create a space for his guests and himself to work towards some kind of emotional detente.
These conversations had a magic to them, even if they could be a little painful to listen to. They’re tetchy and tender in equal measure, the product of smart, sensitive people trying to take back dumb, insensitive things they’ve said and done.
Take Maron’s two-part interview with Louis CK from 2010. This conversation was named “the greatest podcast episode ever” by the editors of Slate four years later, largely because of the rawness of two guys who had been as close as could be but who’d fallen out. Both Maron and CK had been through the ringer: divorces, cancelled TV shows, male pattern baldness. Over the course of the chat, they found ways to forgive each other, and maybe themselves.
That Maron has distanced himself from CK following the well-documented reports of CK’s harassment of female comics only makes that hard-won reunion more poignant. Sometimes we come together with friends only to fall out again. Life is long.
Since those early episodes, Maron has gotten a lot better at being open. In 2020, he lost his partner, Lynn Shelton, which blew open his heart in the worst and best ways possible; he’s found success on his own terms, which has only made him a more generous interviewer and person. At 62, Maron’s grown the hell up, such that so many conversations with younger, more famous people don’t bring out his old cat-like tendency to bat ’em around and shred ’em. He also stopped asking every male guest if they were a jock in high school, once perhaps his ultimate shibboleth.
How great would it be to find the time to sit with an old pal and talk for an hour uninterrupted by work, family, or New York Times alerts about the end of democracy? After the first 20 minutes of thrusts and parries, wouldn’t it be so nice to find the connection and really get into it and find out, once and for all, “are we good?”
As Maron begins to sunset his show, his heart is, once again, blown open. He ended a conversation with podcaster and writer Tom Scharpling, whom Maron has known for decades, by telling him “I love you,” a gesture that would’ve been hard to imagine 16 years ago.
Maron has said that he and his producer, Brendan McDonald, always told each other that they would end the show when they knew it was time. These days, I sense some doubt creeping into Maron’s opening monologues — he told listeners to follow him on Instagram to hear him in the future — but also resolve. The show is ending. I’ll have to find someone else to hang out with as I pick up my dog’s poop.
Listening between the lines, it sounds to me like McDonald was more ready to be done than Maron. If Maron is really ending the show out of loyalty to McDonald, the person whose partnership he called “the longest and healthiest relationship” he’s ever had, that is a rare and colossal act of friendship.
Would that we all had friends (real and parasocial) who’d do that for us. We’d be so good, we wouldn’t even have to ask.
