There is nothing on British radio like This American Life. The concept is simple: “Each week on our show we tackle a theme, and bring you a variety of stories on that theme,” as host Ira Glass says at the start of every episode. But if you haven’t heard the show—which mixes Errol Morris-style documentary-making with more personal, intimate stories—it’s hard to give a sense of what it’s actually like. (If you’re wondering where to start, here's my pick of the best episodes.)
In the US This American Life is so well known that it has inspired a mini-industryofparodies, as well as an inevitablebacklash. But its influence is undeniable—both aesthetically (the show has been praised/blamed for promoting the rise of personal and—that dread word—quirky storytelling), and in more concrete ways as well, helping to launch the careers of writers like David Sedaris and Sarah Vowell, and drawing attention to more serious stories with its investigative reporting (such as the 2011 case of a Georgia law court which seemed to be abusing its power).
Back in 2011 I sat down with the host and mastermind behind the show, Ira Glass, to discuss whether the series will ever make it on to the BBC, the conservatism of broadcast journalism and how an episode of This American Life differs from regular radio.
I understand that you’ve been trying to get This American Life on the BBC, but that it’s proved to be a rather complicated process.
We’ve been trying to get on the BBC in an active way for about a year. What happens is that every few months we wake up and say “Wait, wasn’t one of our year’s goals to get on the BBC?” And then Seth Lind, our production manager, and I will look at each other and say, “Who were we supposed to call? What was supposed to happen next?” And then the two of us will call or mail the one guy we know at the BBC or the contact at our distributor who’s supposed to be making this happen.
Do you think the show is as accessible if you’re British or Australian, say?
We honestly don’t think about it that way. We just think “What would amuse us to hear on the radio?” and, to the extent that we are citizens of the world, we assume that it will apply to anyone.
How have you pitched the show to the BBC?
My impression was that the name of the show was not a big selling point, so we thought we could come to the BBC with Radiolab and present it as a package which they could present as “new approaches to radio journalism from America.” So it’d be one show one week, and the other show the other week.
How big is your podcasting subscription in the UK?
13,000 a week [25,000 as of April 2013], out of about 650,000 globally [now 900,000]. After the US, our number one country is Canada, then the UK, Australia and Japan.
How different do you think This American Life is to standard American public radio?
We are consciously trying to push the bounds of radio in a bunch of ways. For one thing, we view our job as being entertainers. We take that as a premise, and although in some ways it’s a very high-minded, mission-y show, we feel like a lot of people who do that kind of thing tend to be very corny. We feel like the only reason to listen to a show like this would be that it’s fun or to get caught up in the plot, so we are constantly trying to get stories where we get away from the old-fashioned, deep-voiced, authoritative narrator and to a much more conversational presentation. The stories have a plot and, like a movie, they’re entirely about character and scenes, emotional moments, funny moments.
There’s no reflection on any big global issue or issue of any sort. It’s taking the tools of journalism and applying it to everyday life, being very aggressive about using plot and character and scene and scoring the whole thing with music so it plays like a movie.
Do you think there’s something inherently conservative about the way radio shows are made? It seems to me that TV and documentaries look quite different today compared to the 70s, but on radio—at least in Britain—the format of the programmes is still very similar to how it was 20 or 30 years ago. Is that the same in America?
It’s funny you say that because I find television journalism to be much more primitive than radio journalism. If anything, at least in the States, television journalism to me seems mired in the aesthetics of the 60s and 70s where they still have these fake theatrical, fake serious presenters who talk in a deep voice to let you know that they’re serious people.
There’s a grandeur to it which seems completely misplaced. Every story is 1 minute 45 seconds or shorter and the way the reporters talk when they’re on the scene is utterly predictable and dull. There’s no room in television journalism for feeling or emotion or humour or a sense of discovery or a sense of joy or just anything that makes life worth living or is interesting.
Occasionally there’ll be a really talented presenter like Anderson Cooper on CNN who just through sheer force of personality manages to actually seem like a human being. He designs his shows so you feel like he’s a thoughtful person who’s learning things as he’s going and presenting them to you and you trust him. But he is such an anomaly that he stands out.
Generally the aesthetics of broadcast journalism seem to me to be incredibly primitive. It’s still so new: I feel like it hasn’t caught up to the aesthetics of the internet and the way most of us consume media where what we’re used to is a more chatty, conversational tone. Truthfully I think that’s why, at least here in the States, every form of fact-based journalism is losing audience. Except public radio, actually, which is growing. But network-television news is losing audience, cable-television news is losing audience, you know, newspapers are dying and what’s growing is public radio, in a very small way, and then opinion grows in all of its forms, from Fox News Channel and John Stewart and the political blogs—those are growing. Partly, I think, because they talk in a human voice and I feel like the aesthetics of broadcast journalism need to catch up with that.
So is that how This American Life was born? You were mainly talking about TV just now but when you were conceiving the show, were you frustrated with traditional forms of broadcast journalism?
Partly. The radio show was born in opposition to that but the deeper impulse of the radio show was that there’s a kind of thing which I like on the radio and I thought you could do a whole hour of that. It wasn’t more complicated than that.
And does the show have an indefinite future?
Oh I think so, yeah. I mean—in year three or four, there was a question, are we gonna exhaust this format? But honestly it seems like we just keep finding more stuff to do. The thing that’s been interesting is doing the news —like we did a show called “The Giant Pool of Money” which explained the economic crisis. And two weeks ago, we tried this show whose theme was just things that happened this week.
How does your approach to reporting current affairs differ from more traditional outlets?
It’s funny because we’ll work to milk the feelings. Sometimes we work with regular reporters—there was this show we did about the decline of the American car industry. Starting in the 1970s, American cars started to lose market share to foreign cars. It was clear what was happening—these better-made foreign car companies were encroaching on the US, and the US car makers had less than half of their own country’s market. Whereas their share was over 90 per cent, maybe 95 per cent in the 60s—it’s insane how complete the dominance was.
We wanted a story that could explain why it took Detroit so long to figure out that something was going wrong. In looking for the story what we wanted was something that could feel like a fable, something that could feel like the entire story in one place. We thought: let’s find a place where somebody knew “We’ve gotta fix this,” and we found it. GM did a joint venture with Toyota in the 1970s where Toyota taught GM how to do everything it does. GM implemented it [the recommendations] and it was the most profitable and most efficient plant. And they were making better cars than any plant in the United States with half the workforce.
And so it’s just an insane success and GM even had a team that was supposed to come in and put it out to the rest of the company, the largest car maker in the country, the largest in the world actually at the time. And we basically found those guys and said, “What did you do?”
The reporter who was doing the story was a really wonderful but very traditional broadcast news reporter named Frank Langfitt. When we started it I remember having to say to him, “Everything you’re doing is right. Now just add one thing and that thing is: you want them to tell you the story as a story. Really focus on what happened first, what happened second, this led to this, led to that. Get them to describe the scenes and the dialogue. In every scene you need to ask them “What did they feel?”
How did it work out?
It was easy for him—he was a great reporter. He added that to his bag of tricks and instantly every interview he did had huge dimension. It was striking for me that—for somebody who was, in his normal world, one of the best reporters at the network—that it wasn’t a given that you were going to ask characters about feelings.
When we did the “This Week” show, one of the NPR reporters, Robert Smith, who worked with us on it, did the political story on this candidate [Herman Cain] running for the Republican nomination for president. I asked him what was different and he said “I’ve done plenty of political stories but I’ve never asked a politician his feelings on anything.” You know, like “What are your feelings going into tonight’s debate? What has to happen? How do you feel now that it’s happened?” “We just don’t do that,” he said.
Well, I guess Herman Cain was also unusual for a politician because he gave you a real answer.
Yeah. Most politicians don’t want to go there.
Another distinctive aspect of This American Life is that you seem to actively make the team that puts it together part of the show itself. For instance, you did a show about testosterone in which you tested all the staff on the show to see who had the highest levels.
Yup, and in this week’s show [“The Psychopath Test”], we all took the psychopath test [that Jon Ronson wrote about in his book of the same name]—we paid a psychologist to administer it. Then we did the thing we did in the testosterone show where we all went into a studio and predicted who was gonna score the highest, and then the guy came in and gave us our scores.
How much is that conscious—making the audience feel like they’re listening to a bunch of friends who put the show together?
Totally conscious. I feel like it’s more fun that way. It’s not even a very sophisticated reason, it’s just more fun. It seems like if you’re a regular listener you’re getting to know us in some sort of elliptical way.
I guess doing that also helps to build a devoted fanbase.
I think that’s true but I think it makes it sound a little more mercantile than we mean it. Part of the reason the show’s designed this way is that we want to be able to do every possible move you can do to amuse yourself on the air. It exists for our amusement first and foremost.
Where to start with This American Life? Here are five of the best episodes
