It's about friggin' time

Those who are long-time readers of this blog know of our long-standing wistful feeling of bereftness, even after lo these five-and-a-half years, that we will never again be able to turn on the radio at six minutes past six AM and hear the opening bars of that bumper music from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, followed by "It's six past the hour and this...is Morning Sedition!" And we at Casa la Brilliant are not alone. There's Melina and Seanie and Vernon and PJ and Krista and many, many more, for whom a radio show that ran for not even two years created a special kind of community. And at the forefront of some of the most brilliant radio comedy ever recorded was Marc Maron, who started out as a neurotic basket case, but who learned in that short time how to do radio. Because Maron might be a really funny comedian, but he's a GREAT radio host and interviewer. And in the last year, with his increasingly successful (and important in the industry) podcast, he's begun to be able to finally hone his craft without a bunch of inept suits being scared to death of what he brings to the table.

And now, at least on some NPR affiliates, Marc Maron is going to be back on terrestrial radio -- not live, not daily, but in a special version of WTF put together specifically for public radio.

Jesse Thorn of The Sound of Young America announced the good news a few days ago:

For about six months now, Sound of Young America editor Nick White and I have been working on a secret project. Now, the secret can be revealed... please welcome WTF with Marc Maron, the public radio series!

We've taken the hundreds of episodes of the WTF podcast and boiled them down to what we think is ten hours of exceptionally compelling radio. We've chosen the best stories and the best guests and made a ten-episode public radio series, produced by Marc, Nick and me.

Thanks to the kind support of Torey Malatia and Ira Glass, our first station commitment came from WBEZ and Chicago Public Media. We've got lots of other stations on tap, but feel free to let your station know it's available on PRX and that you love it. We hope that stations will air it this summer and early fall all over the country. (It was Torey and Ira's insistence, by the way, that led us to keep the name "WTF".)

If you want to hear the show, you can check it out, share it and review it on PRX. Our goal was to capture what makes WTF special and communicate it to folks who aren't comedy nerds - or even necessarily comedy fans. I think they sound wonderful.

So far only a few affiliates have picked up the show, and it looks like it will be a 10-episode run at first. But hey...you've got to start somewhere, and after a five year absence, it will be nice to have Marc Maron back where he belongs.