![]() It’s key to remember that all of this started with Maron’s incredibly successful WTF podcast, that began in 2009 and now has over 700 episodes. ![]() ![]() “As a comic, you tend to believe that you’re a pretty selfish person, so my evolution as a human seems to have helped a lot of people and I find that very humbling.” I really never thought of myself as the boss, even though my name is on the show, I just wanted everything to go well and to grow and I think that’s happening.” I entered this open to learning about the whole process. “I like that I was able to know enough about myself that I knew there was going to be a learning curve with almost every element of this – acting, writing, producing, directing. I’m sober, we have sober guys on the set and it was like this beautiful bonding thing.”Īfter completing four seasons of the series, Maron admits that he’s discovered a few things, mostly about himself. He turned out to be just amazing because he was new to recovery and this character was really very close to who he was at that time. So we reached out to him, he came in and auditioned, and we booked him right away. We’d seen Chet and knew that he’d had a little trouble in this area but that he’d gotten cleaned up. He divulges how Hanks (yes, Tom’s son) came to his role on the series, saying, “We conceived of the character to be this rich kid in rehab with me. One of the guests Maron wants to really give a shout out to is Chet Hanks. Teasing a bit about season four, Maron says that Judd Hirsch and Sally Kellerman return as his parents, Constance Zimmer and Ron Perlman also show up, as do M.C. Almost all of the major writing, except minor changes here and there, was done before we started shooting.” I really need that to happen that way because every phase of the writing has to move through me and once we start actually shooting it gets really hectic because I’m in nearly every scene. We’d meet at one of our houses and work on breaking the stories for each episode. To explain how he and his team crafted the through-line for this season, Maron says, “Once I came up with the arc of the season, we started working a month before we were even officially in the room. But, then comes a bunch other types of screwing up, because, you know, that’s how it goes.” “I get clean pretty quickly we don’t leave me all screwed up on drugs for too long. Maron also wants to be clear that the whole of season four is not about his character struggling in rehab. I think what we did was to utilize relationships, some established and some new, to generate conflict and then we found the real humor in those relationships and those conflicts.” “It was kind of challenging to do comedy, but there was a way to do it and I think we found it. To make this season of the show funny, wasn’t exactly easy, but it wasn’t too difficult either, says Maron. I didn’t feel a personal threat to my sobriety, but I wanted to make sure I didn’t trivialize any of it.” The real trick to it is to not make a mockery of the tragic nature of the disease of addiction to honor and respect the real horror of it and the constant struggle of recovery. “I’m very stable in my sobriety and opiates are not my thing. Maron himself has never been shy about his own recovery and says that his playing an addict is just that – acting. “The real trick to it is to not make a mockery of the tragic nature of the disease of addiction to honor and respect the real horror of it and the constant struggle of recovery.” “I just came up with this idea that we could do three shows within a show – Pick up where we left as if I’d been out for a year using drugs and that way we have to get me clean and back into life, and then I have to make decisions about my future. Shifting the narrative this season opened up a bevy of new possibilities, explains Maron. I thought we’d used a lot of my life and I didn’t want to start becoming redundant so we needed to take a new approach.” I really didn’t want to return to the world that we’d established because I thought we’d played out all the story possibilities. It would have been a dark end, but it would have been fitting. “The way season three ended was sort of jarring and in my mind, I saw it as a possible end of the series because when you do TV you don’t know if you’re coming back. Taking the title character down the road of addiction and recovery wasn’t exactly planned from the get-go, says Maron. Quickly, it’s apparent that this relapse has cost Maron nearly everything, including his home and his main source of income, his podcast, of which he hasn’t worked on in a year. ![]()
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