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This American Life |
| This American Life | |
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| Other names | Your Radio Playhouse |
|---|---|
| Genre | Radio short stories and essays |
| Running time | ca. 60 min. |
| Country |  United States |
| Languages | English |
| Home station | WBEZ |
| Syndicates | Public Radio International, Showtime |
| Hosts | Ira Glass |
| Creators | Ira Glass Torey Malatia |
| Writers | Various |
| Producers | Julie Snyder Jane Feltes Sarah Koenig Lisa Pollak Alissa Shipp Nancy Updike Alex Blumberg |
| Executive producers | Ira Glass |
| Narrated by | Ira Glass |
| Recording studio | Manhattan, NY |
| Air dates | 17 November 1995 to present |
| Audio format | Stereophonic |
| Website www.thisamericanlife.org |
|
 PodcastTAL Podcast |
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This American Life (TAL) is a weekly hour-long radio program produced by Chicago Public Radio and hosted by Ira Glass. It is distributed by Public Radio International on PRI affiliate stations 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, 1995,1 under the show's original title, Your Radio Playhouse.
A television program of the same name and basic structure of the radio program airs on the Showtime cable network, and features Ira Glass as the host and executive producer.
Contents |
Each week's show loosely centers on a particular theme. The theme of the show is explored in several "acts", usually two to five. On occasion, an entire program will consist of a single act. A notable exception was the show "20 Acts in 60 Minutes", which broke the normal convention by presenting twenty acts in one hour. Each act is produced using a combination of staff and freelance contributors.
Content varies widely by episode, and stories are often told as first-person narratives. The mood of the show ranges from gloomy to ironic, from thought-provoking to hilarious. The show often addresses current events, such as Hurricane Katrina in "After the Flood". Listeners may be introduced to novel subjects and issues as well, since the program covers fringe groups within the USA as well as international matters. Often This American Life features stories which explore aspects of human nature, such as "Kid Logic", which presented pieces on reasoning of children.
The end credits of each show are read by Ira Glass, and include a quotation extracted from some portion of that show, which Glass attributes out of context to WBEZ general manager Torey Malatia.
Ira Glass, the creator of This American Life, has served as producer and host since its November 17, 1995 debut. The show's first year was produced on a budget that was tight even by U.S. public radio standards: US$243,000 outfitted a studio, covered marketing costs, purchased satellite time, and paid for four full-time staffers and various freelance writers and reporters.2 National syndication began in June 1996 when Public Radio International formed a distribution partnership with the program. It now airs on 509 PRI affiliate stations in the United States reaching an estimated 1.7 million listeners each week.3 The show is also carried on XM Satellite Radio over the Public Radio International block on the XM Public Radio channel. The show is also consistently rated as the 1st or 2nd most downloaded podcast on iTunes for each week.
Originally titled Your Radio Playhouse, the show's name was changed beginning with the March 21, 1996 episode. The reference to each segment of the show as an "act" is a holdover from its original "playhouse theme". TAL helped launch the literary careers of many including contributing editor Sarah Vowell and essayists David Rakoff and David Sedaris.3
Discussions of a television adaptation of TAL date back to at least 1999.2 In January 2006, Showtime announced it had greenlighted six episodes of a new series based on TAL.4 The announcement noted that each half-hour episode "will be hosted by Ira Glass and will explore a single theme or topic through the unique juxtaposition of first-person storytelling and whimsical narrative."4
For budgetary reasons, Ira Glass and four of the radio show's producers left Chicago for New York, where Showtime is headquartered.3 In January 2007, it was announced that Glass had completed production on the show's first season, with the first episode set to premiere on March 22. TAL has a contract for a total of 30 shows over the next four years.5 Writers for the show include Chris Ware, Ira Glass, and Haruki Murakami, who has also done uncredited writing for the Adult Swim show "Squidbillies. (citation needed"
Stories from TAL have been used as the basis of movie scripts. In 2002 the show signed a six-figure deal with Warner Bros. giving the studio two years of "first-look" rights to its hundreds of past and future stories.6 One film to have apparently emerged from the deal is Unaccompanied Minors, a 2006 film directed by Paul Feig and reportedly based on "In The Event of An Emergency, Put Your Sister in an Upright Position" from "Babysitting".7 In June 2008, Spike Lee bought the movie rights to Ronald Mallett's memoir, whose story was featured in the episode "My Brilliant Plan".8
Potential Warner Bros films:9
Paramount Pictures and Broadway Video are in production on Curly Oxide and Vic Thrill, a film based on the TAL story in the episode "My Experimental Phase".10
This American Life has taken the radio show on the road three times since 2000; material recorded on each of the three tours has been edited into an episode which aired on the radio shortly after the tour.
On May 1st 2008, This American Life was the first major public media program to use Digital cinema, distributing a one hour long program titled "This American Life - Live!" to select cinemas. PRI originally conceived of the idea to serve stations around the country 11. This American Life Live! was presented exclusively in select theatres by National CineMedia's (NCM) Fathom, in partnership with BY Experience and Chicago Public Radio, and in association with Public Radio International 12.
From 1998-2005, American Life could be accessed online in two formats: A free RealAudio stream available from the official show website, and an DRM encrypted download available through Audible.com, which charged $4 per episode. In early 2006, the show began to offer MP3 copies of each episode, which could be streamed from the show's website using a proprietary Flash player. While users were not given a direct link to the streaming MP3 files, it was possible for savvy users to save these files to their computer for later playing.
Since October 2006, This American Life has offered a free podcast feed to members of the public. Under this arrangement, each show is made available to podcast subscribers on the Monday following its national broadcast. After seven days, the link to the MP3 is removed from the podcast feed. Older shows can be streamed online via the show's website, or purchased from Apple's iTunes store for $0.95 per episode.
Since the move to MP3 files in 2006, the show has relied on an extremely lightweight Digital Rights Management system, based on security through obscurity and legal threats. While the show episodes are removed from the podcast RSS feed after a week, they remain on This American Life's server, accessible to anyone that knows the predictable location.13 On at least three different occasions, Internet users have created their own unofficial podcast feeds, deep linking to the MP3 files located on the This American Life webserver. In all three instances, the podcast feeds were removed from the Internet once representatives from Public Radio International contacted the individuals responsible for creating the feeds.14 1516
According to statements made during fund-drives, the show is downloaded by more than 400,000 people each week. These millions of downloads consume significant amounts of bandwidth, which costs the show over $150,000 per year. The show has inserted a number of requests for financial assistance into the beginning of podcast episodes, requesting help, in order to pay for the bandwidth costs. This American Life is burdened with these bandwidth costs due to a decision to host the popular MP3 files on its own servers. Democracy Now, another popular radio show and podcast also receives millions of downloads per year, but is able to avoid the cost associated with bandwidth, due to its decision to distribute the files via the non-profit Internet Archive and the BitTorrent file-sharing system.
Early response to This American Life was largely positive. In 1998, Mother Jones magazine called the program "hip--as well as intensely literary and surprisingly irreverent."17
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."18
Third Coast International Audio Festival
This American Life was referenced in the television series The O.C., prompting the character Summer to respond, "Is that that show by those hipster know-it-alls who talk about how fascinating ordinary people are?" and, with a dismissive snort, "Gawd!" This reference was itself repeated in a segment of the 2007 Live Tour episode, when Glass, a self-confessed shameless fan of the teen soap opera, described his experience responding to the aforementioned line. 19
The Onion, a parody newspaper, published a satirical story on April 20, 2007, entitled "This American Life Completes Documentation Of Liberal, Upper-Middle-Class Existence".20 The average age of This American Life listeners is 47.21
Episodes of TAL are accompanied by music, in the form of interludes between acts (credited in the episode guide for each show), and incidental background music during acts. Background music is typically not credited, but provides important thematic emphasis.
Some songs and artists that have played a role in TAL background music include the following.
Some of the show's episodes are accompanied by multimedia downloads available on This American Life's website. One notable mention is a remake of the Elton John song "Rocket Man" that was produced for episode 223, "Classifieds", and released as an MP3. The song was performed by a "one day band" composed of musicians looking for work in the classifieds. The band, consisting of various performers (one played a Theremin), met and practiced for only one day before recording the song.
Three 2-disc CD sets collecting some of the producers' favorite acts have been released: Lies, Sissies, and Fiascoes: The Best of This American Life was released on May 4, 1999; Crimebusters + Crossed Wires: Stories from This American Life was released on November 11, 2003; and Stories of Hope and Fear was released on November 7, 2006.
A 32-page comic book, Radio: An Illustrated Guide (ISBN 0-9679671-0-4), documents how an episode of TAL is put together. It was drawn by cartoonist Jessica Abel, written by Abel and Glass, and first published in 1999.
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Host Senior Producer
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Producers
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Contributing editors
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Production Manager
Music Supervisor
Music Consultant
Web Manager
Intern
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