This American Life

"It's This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our show, we bring you a theme, and then present variations on that theme. This week..."

This American Life is a long-running (1995-present), award-winning weekly Documentary series on American public radio, hosted by Ira Glass. Produced by Chicago Public Radio, it's a unique take on radio journalism, with a hip, literary style.

Often thought of as an NPR production, it was actually distributed by its rival, PRI, until it became self-distributed in 2014. However, the show actually does air on many NPR member stations, as those stations are more often than not, also PRI affiliates. (It also airs on CBC Radio in Canada and Radio National in Australia.) They have also done occasional Crossovers, in which NPR reporters like Chana Joffe-Walt present a story on TAL, which adds to the confusion.

Indeed, starting in 2008, TAL started a continued partnership with NPR News, the Planet Money quasi-Spin-Off podcast, consisting of NPR economics/politics reporters Adam Davidson, David Kestenbaum, Chana Joffe-Walt, and Jacob Goldstein, along with TAL regular Alex Blumberg talking about economics issues, ever since the Blumberg-Davidson TAL episode "The Giant Pool of Money" (basically the Origin Story of the financial crisis) proved to be a smash success. The Planet Money team, confusingly, also appears on actual NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered.

The show has an unusual structure based around the idea of storytelling. Each week's show loosely centers on a particular theme, and divided into several acts, nonfiction and fiction stories that explore that theme. Each show begins with a short prologue introduced by Glass, who then explains the theme between the prologue and first act. The number of stories varies by show, the range so far is 1 to 20.

In 2007, it became the first US public-radio series to Spin-Off a show on a commercial TV network, with an Emmy-winning Showtime version. After two seasons, the show was canceled by request of Glass and company, due to the difficult scheduling required to make both a TV show and a radio show simultaneously.

It's also known for launching the careers of several popular writers, such Sarah Vowell and David Sedaris, as well as featuring other notable recurring contributors, such as journalist David Rakoff and comedian Mike Birbiglia.

TAL also has presented a number of live shows throughout its history, and more recently, live digital-cinema broadcasts to movie theaters. These often serve as fundraisers for the radio show. The most recent of these included the live singing debut of Joss Whedon.

Parodies include an article from The Onion here, Stephen Colbert's interview with Glass, a few episodes of the Kasper Hauser podcast (found here), and an ongoing series, This American Wife.

Available online as a podcast, which in 2020 was the first podcast to win a Pulitzer Prize (for "The Out Crowd").

Tropes used in This American Life include:

American Accents: Ira Glass' Baltimorese aside, this show may have recorded every accent in the United States.
American Title
Butt Monkey: Terrible kisser, cuckhold, sleepwalker? Thy name is Mike Birbiglia. A man who was once accused by police of crashing into his car with his car.
Came Back Wrong: Chance the bull, in one of the stories.
Christmas Episode: There is a new one every few years. The annual poultry slam counts as this.
Follow the Leader: Several other PRI shows, such as To The Best of Our Knowledge and The Story, follow a similar story model, and probably wouldn't exist without the success of This American Life. Many stations air them back to back as well. The CBC series WireTap is arguably a Spin-Off, as its produced and hosted by former TAL producer Jonathan Goldstein, and shares several staff writers.
- RadioLab is starting to become more like TAL, now that it has correspondents and presents personal stories and anecdotes in addition to the science stories that made it famous.
Harsher in Hindsight: Discussed Trope. In 2009, the show did an episode at Penn State University to discuss its #1 Party School ranking. In 2011, after the Jerry Sandusky fiasco, they returned to State College and interviewed many of the same people. Glass himself notes how chilling many of the original statements were in the new context.
Human Interest Story: A great many stories about unusual situations in the lives of ordinary Americans. It's sort of a human interest series actually, though not in the same sense as the typical TV newsmagazine.
"I Want" Song: Referred to as the "I Wish" song, this was the subject of the prologue of Episode 259, "Promised Land". Then Ira sings one about the show.
Intrepid Reporter: A number of episodes are devoted to what is really best described as muckraking, with several of the show's contributors and occasionally Glass himself (as he did in 2011 exposing a Hanging Judge at a drug court in southern Georgia) getting into the act.
It's Been Done: The photo is the setting of Ira's host segments from the first TV season. Glass and the production team didn't realize Monty Python's Flying Circus already did it until it was too late.
- A self educated electrician and inventor who's a friend of the reporter claims to make an important discovery indicating Einstein might have been wrong. Possibly revolutionary stuff! But as the friend investigates and tries to get a credible analysis he learns more and more that is friend is mentally disturbed and wrote a paper that's an example of thousands sent to prominent physicists each week claiming the same thing. Ultimately he gets a sit down with a physics professor to go through the paper with a fine-tooth comb to point out the dozens of errors his friend made that gave him the incorrect conclusion. The friend still won't admit he might have been wrong, leading to serious doubts about his mental stability.
Live Episode: "What I Learned from Television" and "Return to the Scene of the Crime."
Magazine Show
Mood Whiplash: One episode ("Fall Guy", aired June 28, 2009) jumps from a comedian talking about his beatdown-filled freshman year of high school as part of his routine, to a sobering story about Lynndie England and the Abu-Ghraib prison scandal.
- This actually happens a lot, to juxtapose how many different variations on a story are out there. For example, if the show is about finding your biological parents after a long search, expect the story of the happy reunion to be followed by the story of finding only their graves a week after they died.
Once an Episode: During the credits, producer Torey Mallatia is quoted as saying something, followed by a clip from earlier in the show. It is inevitably funny, and hence also counts as something of a Credits Gag.
Police Brutality: One episode revolved around an NYPD officer who secretly recorded his superiors pushing illegal arrest quotas. When they figured it out, they raided his house with SWAT teams in the guise of "protecting him" from committing suicide. Only his second recorder saved him from being mentally discharged from the force and discredited. Upon moving to upstate NY, the local cops gave him the Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves treatment.
Sheep in Wolf's Clothing: In 1996, Dan Savage became a local functionary of the Washington Republican Party in a vain effort to reduce Gay Panic in state politics.
Something Completely Different: A show this long-running is bound to have a lot. "20 Acts in 60 Minutes" and "Stories Pitched by Our Parents" are just a small sample.
Superhero Episode: Superpowers, though only one story focuses on a person actually trying to be a traditional superhero, while the others are more about superhuman powers (as the title suggests).
The Deep South: Though the region has been covered before, the show once sent dozens of staff members to different counties in Georgia to find interesting stories. Ironically, the biggest story– possibly finding the original recipe for Coca-Cola– was saved for a later episode.
The Movie: Unaccompanied Minors, based on a non-fiction essay by Susan Burton that first appeared on the This American Life episode "Babysitting". It's the first film to come out of a first-refusal deal Warner Brothers has for movies based off This American Life stories and essays.