Wendell Marchant teaches sophomore English at a Catholic boys' school just outside Saint Louis, which means he spends his weekdays explaining comma splices and his weekends explaining nothing to no one. For about ten years he's spent those weekends the same way: at his kitchen table, a mug of coffee going cold, the Library of Congress newspaper archive open on a laptop, reading about people who lied for a living.

His wife calls it a hobby. The school librarian calls it a problem. He calls it The Footnote — a show about the frauds, hoaxes, and forgotten swindlers history left in the margins. He has no formal training as a historian, which he considers an advantage: he reads the old papers the way they were meant to be read, by someone with time to kill and a suspicious nature.

He works with vøiddo studio, who handle everything that isn't the reading and the talking.