This American Life (TAL) is an American weekly hour-long radio program produced in collaboration with Chicago Public Media and hosted by Ira Glass.[3] It is broadcast on numerous public radio stations in the United States and internationally, and is also available as a free weekly podcast. Primarily a journalistic non-fiction program, it has also featured essays, memoirs, field recordings, short fiction, and found footage. The first episode aired on November 17, 1995,[4] under the show's original title, Your Radio Playhouse. The series was distributed by Public Radio International[5] until June 2014, when the program became self-distributed with Public Radio Exchange delivering new episodes to public radio stations.[6]
A television adaptation of the show ran for two seasons on the Showtime cable network[7] between June 2007 and May 2008.
Format[edit]
Further information: Lists of This American Life episodes
Each week's show has a theme, explored in several "acts". On occasion, an entire program will consist of a single act. Each act is produced by a combination of staff and freelance contributors. Programs usually begin with a short program identification by host Ira Glass who then introduces a prologue related to the theme which precedes act one. This prologue will then lead into the presentation of the theme for that week's show. After the introduction of the theme, Glass then introduces the first act of the program.
Content varies widely by episode. Stories are often told as first-person narratives. The mood of the show ranges from gloomy to ironic, from thought-provoking to humorous.[8] The show often addresses current events, such as Hurricane Katrina in "After the Flood".[8] Often This American Life features stories which explore aspects of human nature, such as "Kid Logic", which presented pieces on the reasoning of children.[8] The majority of interviews with subjects never make it to the air, as many as 80 percent, because the team looks for interviewees who recount stories in a "particular way".[9]
The end credits of each show are read by Glass, and include a sound clip extracted out of context from some portion of that show, which Glass humorously attributes to previous WBEZ general manager Torey Malatia, who co-founded the show with Glass in 1995.
Glass has stated he is contractually obligated to mention station WBEZ (and previously, also former distributor PRI) three times in the course of the show.[10]
History[edit]
In the early 1990s, Glass co-hosted, with Gary Covino, a Friday-night show in Chicago called The Wild Room. However, he was looking for new opportunities in radio,[11] and had been sending grant proposals to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for two years when, in 1995, the MacArthur Foundation approached Torey Malatia, general manager of Chicago Public Radio. They offered him US$150,000 to make a show featuring local Chicago writers and performance artists.[12] Malatia approached Glass with the idea, who countered that he wanted to do a weekly program, but with a different premise, a budget of US$300,000, and sights on taking it national. In a 1998 article in the Chicago Reader, Michael Miner quoted Covino as saying, "The show [Glass] proposed was The Wild Room. He just didn't call it The Wild Room."[11] Glass, however, did not include his co-host in his plans and assured him that the deal was unlikely to happen. When the show went on without him, Covino says he felt "betrayed".[11] While Glass admits he wasn't transparent about his plans, in that same article, he explained, "Every week on The Wild Room we came to the show with two independent sensibilities. I love Gary. I loved Gary. But I didn't want to keep doing that show...and the notion that everything I brought to The Wild Room I got from him I find completely infuriating...I didn't want to do free-form radio anymore. I have no interest in improvisation. It might have been possible to design a show with him that he would have felt comfortable with and I would have felt comfortable with. But at that point—I was in my late 30s—I just wanted to do the thing I wanted to do."[11]
We always saw the show as an entertainment. We saw ourselves as designing a format in opposition to the way stories were structured on NPR. We talked about it as a public radio show for people who didn't necessarily like public radio.
Glass to The New York Review of Books, August 2019[13]
The show debuted on WBEZ in Chicago as Your Radio Playhouse on November 17, 1995.[14] Glass conceived a format where each segment of the show would be an "act,"[14] and at the beginning of each episode, would explain that show consisted of "documentaries, monologues, overheard conversations, found tapes, [and] anything we can think of." Glass also served as executive producer.[citation needed] The program's name was changed beginning with the March 21, 1996, episode,[15] and was picked up nationally by PRI the following June.[16] Chicago Public Media (then called the WBEZ Alliance) produced.[17] The program's first year was produced on a budget that was tight even by US public-radio standards. A budget of $243,000 covered an outfitted studio, marketing costs, satellite time, four full-time staffers, and various freelance writers and reporters.[18] The station was located at Chicago's Navy Pier.[19] Early on, Glass commissioned stories from artists, writers, theater people, and journalists.[13] National syndication began in June 1996 when Public Radio International formed a distribution partnership with the program,[20] and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting awarded the show a three-year grant for $350,000, double what Glass applied for.[21] As time went on, the staff was drawn more to journalistic stories that were, as Glass puts it, "in a style where there were characters and scenes and plot and funny moments."[20] The show is also carried on Sirius XM Satellite Radio over the Public Radio International block on the XM Public Radio channel. In the early 2010's, the program consistently rated as the first- or second-most downloaded podcast on iTunes for each week.[22]
Early response to the program was largely positive. In 1998, Mother Jones magazine called it "hip – as well as intensely literary and surprisingly irreverent."[23] Glass used a unique strategy to promote the show to stations by giving away pledge drive ads he developed himself.[24] By the end of 1999, TAL aired on 325 public radio stations,[25] and, around that time, Rhino Records released a "greatest hits" CD of TAL episodes.[26]
In January 2011, the series was picked up by CBC Radio One in Canada.[27] The program is shortened slightly for the Canadian broadcast to allow for a five-minute newscast at the top of the hour, although this is partly made up for by the removal of mid-program breaks, most of the production credits (apart from that of Malatia), and underwriting announcements (CBC's radio services being fully commercial-free, except when contractually or legally required).
In January 2012, This American Life presented excerpts from a one-man theater show The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs by Mike Daisey as an exposé of conditions at a Foxconn factory in China.[28] The episode was entitled "Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory" and became one of the show's most popular episodes at that time, with 888,000 downloads and 206,000 streams.[29] WBEZ planned to host a live showing and a Q+A of "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs" in Chicago on April 7, 2012.[29] On March 16, 2012, This American Life officially retracted the episode after learning that several events recounted both in the radio story and the monologue were fabrications.[29] WBEZ canceled the planned live performance and refunded all ticket purchases.[29] Airing that day, This American Life devoted the week's show (titled "Retraction") to detailing the inconsistencies in "The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs".[30] The show includes interviews between Rob Schmitz, the reporter who discovered the discrepancies, and Daisey's translator in China, Cathy Lee, as well as an interview between host Glass and Daisey.[30] Daisey apologized for presenting his work as journalism, saying "It's not journalism. It's theater," but refused to acknowledge that he had lied—even in the face of obvious discrepancies.[29] The podcast of this episode became the most downloaded until February 2013.[citation needed]
Two weeks later, the show also reiterated that they had previously removed three stories by Stephen Glass due to dubious content, namely episode 57, "Delivery", episode 79, " Stuck in the Wrong Decade", and episode 86, "How to Take Money from Strangers." The episodes including the segments had inadvertently resurfaced in episode streams due to a website redesign.[31] Though the segments were cut from podcast streams, the transcript of the contents have been kept accessible on the show's official website.[32]
In 2015, the show retracted a story about canvassers who tried to change people's political opinions. The story was based on an article in Science that was also retracted.[33]
In March 2014, the program announced that PRI would stop distributing the show in July, and that May, Glass announced that the staff would be distributing the show themselves, with Public Radio Exchange doing the technical legwork to deliver the audio to the radio stations.[34]
On October 1, 2014, the show produced a spinoff, Serial, a season-long exploration delivered as a podcast series.[35] In 2015, Glass became the sole owner of This American Life; WBEZ continued as a production partner on the show and on Serial with future shows to be independent.[36] In 2017, This American Life launched the podcast S-Town through the spinoff company Serial Productions. Serial Productions was bought by The New York Times Company in 2020. The Times and Serial jointly produced the podcasts Nice White Parents, hosted by Chana Joffe-Walt, which debuted in July 2020; and The Improvement Association, hosted by Zoe Chace, which debuted in April 2021.[37]
Production[edit]
In a 2014 interview, Glass revealed the software and equipment used to make the show. The staff records interviews using Marantz PMD661 digital recorders and Audio Technica AT835b shotgun microphones. After each recording session (whether a single interview or day of recording) he uses a story structuring technique he learned from print journalist Paul Tough. He jots or types all the most memorable moments from the tape, then has the recording transcribed and makes note of any quotes of potential value in the story. He then arranges those quotes into a structured narrative.[38]
To edit each story, the reporter presents the show to other producers.
Guests on the show have included Malcolm Gladwell and Michael Paterniti,[21] who would normally command tens of thousands of dollars for an article but have settled for as little as US$200 per day to have a piece included on the show.[21] The program helped launch the literary careers of many, including contributing editor Sarah Vowell and essayists David Rakoff and David Sedaris.[20]
For live shows, which combine live and pre-recorded elements, Glass previously used a mixing console and CD players. With time, he switched to using an iPad Mini running TouchAble software, which in turn controls the Ableton Live software on his MacBook Air. He can plug the MacBook into the house sound system using the device's headphone jack.[38]
The show offers two, six-month fellowship positions annually for persons who have worked in the field of journalism, but who would like training in how to tell stories in the style of This American Life.[39]
Music[edit]
We don't use music at This American Life to create a mood in a story or make things sound pretty. Instead, it's there to help you make your point ... We're trying to point out what you should be listening for in the tape so you get the same joy or sorrow out of a story that we're feeling. And we use music the same way—it's a little flashlight that helps us get our ideas across.
Jonathan Menjivar, in a guest post for Transom[40]
Episodes of TAL are accompanied by music. Some songs are used between acts and are credited in the episode guide for the show. Other songs are used as thematic background music for stories and are not credited.[citation needed] Jonathan Menjivar is a producer and music supervisor at the show.[40]
"Over the years, we've used hundreds of songs under our stories—and in some stories, we use a number of different songs in different sections. We tried to answer these emails for awhile [sic?], but often it was impossible sometimes to pinpoint which song people were asking about...".[41]
Reception[edit]
Critical reception[edit]
The show received positive reviews from the beginning. Marc Fisher with American Journalism Review drew attention to how the program's production style elicits "a sense of ease, informality and direct, unfiltered access", and "the effect is liberating".[21] After remarking that producing so many stories each episode is "labor intensive," David Stewart with Current said it is "remarkable that while a few stories were fatuous or trite, most were successful and some really memorable." He added, "Whose American life is this? Clearly Ira's: it is kinky, clever, at once disingenuous and innocent, fanciful, rarely too serious...Above all, it is compelling."[25]
The program has received criticism as well. In 2020, author Andrew J Bottomley wrote that the show primarily represents the perspective of its "predominantly white, upper-middle-class, educated audience."[42] He also said the show is "didactic ... extracting from the stories of others a lesson that is then instilled on the audience."[42]
Listenership[edit]
In 1999, more than 800,000 people listened to This American Life each weekend on 332 public radio stations.[21] By 2019, the show broadcast to 2.2 million listeners each week, with an additional podcast audience of 3.6 million.[13]
Awards[edit]
WBEZ-FM received a Peabody Award in 1996 and again in 2006 for TAL, for a show which "captures contemporary culture in fresh and inventive ways that mirror the diversity and eccentricities of its subjects" and "weav[es] original monologues, mini-dramas, original fiction, traditional radio documentaries and original radio dramas into an instructional and entertaining tapestry".[43]
In 2020, This American Life became the first news program to win the Pulitzer Prize for Audio Reporting.[44] The winning work was "The Out Crowd", the 688th episode with "revelatory, intimate journalism that illuminates the personal impact of the Trump Administration's 'Remain in Mexico' policy".[45]
In March 2021, the May 9, 2008, episode, "The Giant Pool of Money", was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry as one of 25 works added to the registry for 2020. It was the first podcast episode ever chosen for inclusion in the registry.[46]