Sarah Marshall, host of the podcast ‘You’re Wrong About,’ talks pop culture myths and her upcoming Philly show

Sarah Marshall, host of the popular history-reframing podcast You’re Wrong About, is bringing the show to Philly, one stop on a national tour she says is “partly an excuse for me to go back to places I miss.” The April 30 show will mark a return for Marshall, who lived in West Philly most recently in the fall of 2016.

A writer and media critic obsessed with people and things who have been “miscast in the public imagination,” Marshall helped usher in the cultural moment we now inhabit. Before it was cool to reassess maligned celebrities and misunderstood events — from Tonya Harding to Princess Diana, O.J. Simpson’s murder trial to Anita Hill’s Senate testimony — Marshall was doing it. She’s drawn, in particular, to stories that reveal our broader cultural blind spots and insecurities.

“I’m researching the Reagans currently. What I find so interesting about them is that they’re two very human, very flawed, very incomplete people,” she said in an interview with The Inquirer. “The way they were lifted up by America showed what kind of incompleteness or flaws we favor, what feels right to us.”

Marshall launched You’re Wrong About with journalist Michael Hobbes in 2018; it took off during the pandemic. Each episode unfolds as a casual conversation between friends, one of whom has recently gone down a rabbit hole and become an enthusiastic expert on a given topic. There’s no gotcha twist; just a thoughtful, deeply researched reanalysis of a story you thought you knew, with special attention paid to the ways race, gender, and capitalism are always skewing our public understanding of what happened. Along the way, the show has become a fan favorite, winning the top prize at the iHeartRadio Podcast Awards last year and regularly leading history podcast charts.

The April 30 live taping will be at the Fillmore Philadelphia at 8 p.m. and will also feature comedian and podcaster Jamie Loftus, music by You’re Wrong About producer Carolyn Kendrick, and a presentation on bimbos, among other topics, Marshall said. The goal is a vaudevillian-style show.

Marshall, who now lives in Portland, Ore., is thrilled to be coming back.

“[In Philly] people walk around with rats on their shoulders. It feels like a world where art is still happening, because people can still live cheaply enough to make it, and you have to drive U-Haul trucks around on cobblestone streets that were designed for horses. It’s like a perfect place,” Marshall said. (Her official bio calls Philly her second-favorite city, but she disavows that).

Asked to choose a You’re Wrong About topic for the region, Marshall said she is fascinated by the early-aughts “kids for cash” scandal in Luzerne County, in which two judges sent thousands of children to for-profit juvenile detention centers in exchange for millions in kickbacks.

“That’s kind of the heart of the real darkness,” Marshall said.

She’s often attracted to stories that reveal that type of darkness. One of her favorite set of episodes was a four-part series on the 2002 D.C. snipers, detailing how one of the men behind the sensational killings became a serial killer effectively as cover for the fact that he wanted to murder his ex-wife.

Since the show’s inception, Marshall and Hobbes (who left the show in 2021 to pursue other projects) have created “a kind of cartography of media dread — [mapping] how such narratives of fear take hold in media and hang on even when they are supported by little evidence,” New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo wrote in 2021.

Marshall credits Philly with some of the original creative energy behind the show; when she lived here, she found herself gathering material for some still-nebulous future project.

“Philly was the first place I lived when I wasn’t in academia, when I wasn’t strapped to a track that was going to take me to the preordained end result,” she said. “It was a place where I learned to stop being a high achiever. That sounds like an insult, but it’s not.”

“An Evening with You’re Wrong About,” April 30, 8 p.m., The Fillmore Philadelphia, 29 E. Allen St., https://livemu.sc/3L0HzYD.