Marc Maron Almost Had A CNN+ Show: ‘Thank God He Didn’t’

February 8, 2023

“CNN offered me a lot of money on their defunct streaming service to do it there,” Maron said of bringing his Instagram Lives to a talk show platform.

Marc Maron revealed that he dodged a bullet with a faulty CNN+ streamer.

The “WTF” podcast host revealed that he was approached by the short-lived streaming platform to host his own show for “a lot of money,” but turned it down due to the timing of the offer.

Maron’s partner, filmmaker Lynn Shelton, died suddenly in 2020 of unknown acute myeloid leukemia. Maron noted that as part of the grieving process, she “started compulsively doing Instagram Lives on a daily basis.”

“It was just me mumbling and doing things around my house and raving and raving about this and that and going through grief and people watching and a lot of people getting a lot out of it,” Maron said. Vulture. “That made me a lot of weird fans.”

The social media presence caught the attention of upstart Warner Bros. flagship Discovery.

“But it resonated with audiences on a daily basis, to the point where CNN on their defunct streaming service offered me a lot of money to do it there,” Maron said. “And I was like that with him. I won’t do it. Thank God I didn’t! But I knew I had to make my voice heard as a performer, and so I did.”

CNN+ launched on March 29, 2022, and was shut down on April 30 of the same year. Only 150,000 subscribers joined, CNN Worldwide CEO and President Chris Licht said in a statement at the time.

“That’s why we’ve decided to wind down CNN+ and focus our investment on CNN’s core newsgathering business and building CNN Digital,” Licht said. “This is not a quality decision; we appreciate all the work, ambition and creativity that went into building CNN+. This organization has fantastic talent and amazing shows. However, our customers and CNN will be best served by a simpler streaming option.”

CNN+ included a Don Lemon talk show, a Jake Tapper book club, an Anderson Cooper show about parenting, and CNN documentaries from “RBG” to “Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice.”

Licht said in January 2023 that CNN needed to restore trust in the brand overall.

“You can talk to a lot of people about why it went bad, but in retrospect, I say one of our missions is to restore our reputation as the most trusted name in news,” Licht said. The Los Angeles Times. “We certainly have research that shows that (trust) has eroded.”

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