Recently, the genre has begun to pop up in more traditional forms of media, most notably with the New York Times’ documentary Framing Britney Spears, which premiered on Hulu in February and received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Documentary. And first and undoubtedly worst among them is Malcolm Gladwell’s “Revisionist History,” which roughly hewed to the theme of revisiting false conceptions of the past for a season or two back in 2016 before evolving into yet another outlet for Gladwell’s intellectually incurious, power-coddling pablum. “Not Past It,” a new show from Gimlet hosted by Simone Polanen, employs a unique conceit: each week’s show is about something that happened during that week at some point in history, with episodes investigating the Paris Hilton sex tape, the Beanie Baby frenzy, and the Enron whistleblower. “What Really Happened?,” produced by The Rock’s Seven Bucks Productions and hosted by the comparatively uncharismatic Andrew Jenks, focuses on the recent past - episodes topics range from the Robert Kraft solicitation incident to Balloon Boy - and is far less prone to introspection concerning its subject matter’s broader political or historical context. “You’re Wrong About” has several thematic cousins in the podcast field, each having found their niche within the cultural revisionism genre. The reporting host gives us a detailed history of what actually happened - be it in the case of Koko the gorilla (she didn’t really know much sign language), the Stanford Prison Experiment (results were greatly oversimplified) and, of course, the McDonald's hot coffee incident - while the non-reporting host injects quips and leads digression-filled banter. The hosts approach their source material from alternating roles: one has done a great deal of research on the subject, while the other has been kept intentionally in the dark beyond their own cursory assumptions, serving as a surrogate for the audience’s presumed cluelessness. ![]() Marshall and Hobbes are, according to their own description, “journalists obsessed with the past” - Marshall has written for The Believer and Buzzfeed News, while Hobbes previously worked for The Huffington Post. The paragon of this genre is “You’re Wrong About,” a podcast hosted by Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbes from 2018 to earlier this month, now hosted solely by Marshall. Over the past few years, a certain genre of media has found opportunity in that gap, debunking false conceptions of the semi-recent past and meditating on the cultural factors which contributed to their initial spread. But the gap never seems to close entirely - there’s always someone left to be brought into the loop, often a great many someones. This is how the process of reversing a publicly agreed-upon narrative tends to go: the original story disseminates quickly and widely, while the corrected record, once surfaced, filters more gradually through the public consciousness, a bit of trivia within a bit of trivia. Liebeck, by this time, had been dead for nearly a decade. The truth of the coffee incident first found a wide audience in 2011 with the release of the anti-tort reform documentary Hot Coffee in 2013, the New York Times published a video retrospective on the case that garnered more than a million views. The coffee handed to her at the McDonalds drive-through that day wasn’t hot - it was boiling, the inevitable spill causing horrific third-degree burns all over her thighs and groin that required skin graft surgery and years of expensive medical treatment. The judgement quickly became a cultural flashpoint, drawing mockery and ire across all forms of media - what kind of person, after all, would do such a thing? The case also became an exemplary “frivolous lawsuit” anecdote used by Republicans in advancing tort reform, a type of legislation that limits the amount of compensation plaintiffs can receive in personal injury and medical malpractice lawsuits, and is to this day a near-universally remembered piece of American pop-culture trivia.Įxcept - and perhaps you’ve heard this part, too - everyone was wrong about Stella Liebeck. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: in 1994, a 79 year-old woman named Stella Liebeck received $2.86 million in damages after suing McDonald’s for giving her coffee that was too hot.
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