You’re Wrong About… Anna Nicole Smith

Maybe this is cheating, since I’ve been a regular listener of You’re Wrong About for about a year (or whenever I went down the rabbit hole of retrospective reading/listening concerning Monica Lewinsky--and their episode about her is wonderful,) but my favorite episode of YWA was re-released over Valentines’ Day weekend, and I decided to give it one more listen. I knew it was a piece of content that had really given me a new perspective on a situation in our popular culture, and I wanted to revisit that.

The “Anna Nicole Smith” episode was one of the first YWAs that I ever listened to. Having been 9(?) when Smith died, it wasn’t a situation with which I was particularly familiar outside of having seen her face on the cover of magazines after she died. This particular episode brings into perspective a lot of the things we don’t think about often when the name Anna Nicole Smith comes to mind--”If they made some prestige Anna Nicole Smith documentary on Netflix today, it would win a thousand Emmys next year.” is one of my favorite statements in this episode, and it seems to be true. She was a trainwreck that everyone loved to laugh until people made an attempt to point out the tragedy of it all.

 The very first thing that always strikes me when I listen to this show is the structure with which they tell the story (and I am the first to admit that I prefer the way Sarah tells a story to the way that Michael does, but that’s surely a conversation for another day.) It’s something I’ve sort of wanted to steal for a while in coming up with formats for a podcast of my own. 

The nature of their show is that one of them is much more familiar with a particular instance or cultural figure than the other, and they proceed to go through the stories--whether the more famous and familiar or the ones that take a bit of a deep dive to find--together. One of the hosts, either Sarah or Michael, is basically a member of the audience. It’s not a moment of solo storytelling or narration, where someone tells the story of a maligned cultural character with no reaction. The other host asks questions about things with which they’re unfamiliar. They’re shown or given different bits of media to which they are meant to react. It’s almost like the other host is one of the listeners, but they’re given a much closer proximity to the story they’re hearing. 

It’s the listener’s first insight into how an audience might react to this new information, but it’s also not necessarily leading you to believe exactly what the same thing as they might. I know I haven’t always agreed with every assertion I’ve heard (like Sarah’s own assertion in this episode that there’s a love story at the heart of pretty much every cultural instance they encounter,) but it brings that perspective into light without making me feel bombarded by just one person’s opinion on the matter.