This American Life is a weekly hour-long American radio program produced in collaboration with Chicago Public Media and hosted by Ira Glass. 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, under the show's original title, Your Radio Playhouse. The series was distributed by Public Radio International until June 2014, when the program became self-distributed with Public Radio Exchange delivering new episodes to public radio stations.
A television adaptation of the show ran for two seasons on the Showtime cable network between June 2007 and May 2008.
Format
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. The show often addresses current events, such as Hurricane Katrina in "After the Flood".
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.
History
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, 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." Glass conceived a format where each segment of the show would be an "act," and was picked up nationally by PRI the following June. Chicago Public Media (then called the WBEZ Alliance) produced. 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. Early on, Glass commissioned stories from artists, writers, theater people, and journalists.
Early response to the program was largely positive. In 1998, Mother Jones magazine called it "hip as well as intensely literary and surprisingly irreverent." Glass used a unique strategy to promote the show to stations by giving away pledge drive ads he developed himself. By the end of 1999, TAL aired on 325 public radio stations; also around that time, Rhino Records released a "greatest hits" CD of TAL episodes.
In January 2011, the series was picked up by CBC Radio One in Canada. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Though the segments were cut from podcast streams, the transcript of the contents have been kept accessible on the show's official website.
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.
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.
On October 1, 2014, the show produced a spinoff, Serial, a season-long exploration delivered as a podcast series. 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. 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.
Production
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.
To edit each story, the reporter presents the show to other producers.
Guests on the show have included Canadian writer Malcolm Gladwell and Michael Paterniti, Former fellows include: Emmanuel Dzotsi, co-host of Serial season 3; BA Parker, host of NPR's Code Switch; Brian Reed, host of S-Town; Ari Saperstein, host of Blind Landing; Jessica Lussenhop, investigative reporter at ProPublica; and current staff members Dana Chivvis, Phia Bennin, Aviva DeKornfeld and Safiyah Riddle.