At the start of the new season of Maron, the title character has a plan: enticing Louis CK to record a new podcast with him, to recreate an early moment of greatness. Back in the real world, Louis CK did just return to Marc Maron’s podcast, WTF, to celebrate the show’s 700th episode. The circumstances surrounding the two situations, however, illustrate how the real and fictional Marc Maron are now in wildly different places.
Distinguishing between the person and the character used to be much harder. The semi-autobiographical Maron centered on a dyspeptic comic named Marc Maron who hosted a steady stream of comedy greats on a podcast he recorded in his garage. Premiering in 2013, the show lagged only a few years and several degrees of prestige behind reality. The guy on TV was just starting to get to the point of requiring an assistant, whereas the real Marc Maron was touring increasingly bigger venues, recording a Netflix special, and writing a New York Times bestselling memoir. But the character and its source still had a lot of things in common back then, not the least of which was well over a decade of sobriety. By the time the fictional Maron caught up to the point of getting his own TV show last season, he ended up relapsing on back pain medication and ruining his shot. The current season catches up with Maron a year later, with the character fully leaning into drug addiction and vagrancy, and deludedly hoping a Louis CK interview can fix everything. For the first time ever, Maron has veered way off the course of its creator’s timeline–into a chaotic alternate reality–and it’s the boldest creative leap in the series’ run yet.
“It’s exploring the worst possible outcome,” Maron says. “Somebody like me who’s got 16 years sober, I’ve seen guys go out after 20 years, and it’s horrendous, and this is usually how it happens. They get some medicine and they’re off to the races. Making this season is a safe way for me to explore the horror of that possibility and do it comedically.”
After spending years establishing the world of the show by drawing almost directly from Maron’s personal life, the creator was worried about it becoming redundant. Instead of giving his namesake a successful TV talk show, he and the writers sent the character’s world up in flames last year with a cringifying season finale. It was a spectacular swan dive intended to maybe serve as the last episode ever. Instead of walking off into the sunset, the character more or less flung himself into the actual sun. Not a happy ending, but a potential ending nonetheless.
But then the series got renewed for a fourth season.
“I was a little bit discouraged and sort of oddly disappointed that we got picked up, in a way,” Maron says. “I didn’t know if I had another season in me, the way that we were doing the show. It seemed like it would be fine with me if they did cancel it and that would be the end.”
When the show did get renewed, though, the looming question was: Where do we go from here? Maron and the writers had to figure out what to do with their off-the-wagon protagonist. Should they just diminish the crisis as a bump in the road, and put him back in the world they’d established? Find the path of least resistance to the character continuing the podcast from his garage and dating badly? The breakthrough came when Maron realized that they could instead simply plow, full speed ahead, in the other direction.