Never Heard Us?
About The Show
Charlie Brill and Mitzie McCall in 1964, ready for their big moment on the
Ed Sullivan show, from the My
Big Break episode.
If you've never heard This American Life, our staff's
favorite shows page provides a great introduction to what we do. You might
want to start
there. Or, if you're looking for a written introduction, here goes:
One of the problems with our show from the start has been that whenever
we try to describe it in a sentence or two, it sounds awful. For instance:
Each week we choose a theme and put together different kinds of stories
on that theme. That doesn't sound like something we'd want to listen to
on the radio, and it's our show. In the early days of the program, in frustration,
we'd sometimes tell public radio program directors that it's basically just
like Car Talk. Except just one guy hosting. And no cars.
It's easy to say what we're not. We're not a news show or a talk show or
a call-in show. We're not really formatted like other radio shows at all.
Instead, we do these stories that are like movies for radio. There are people
in dramatic situations where things happen to them.
There are funny moments and emotional moments and – hopefully –
moments where the people in the story say interesting, surprising things
about it all. It has to be surprising. It has to be fun. There are shows
on public radio with no sense of fun or surprise and we hate those shows.
The program is on nearly 500 public radio stations across the country. It's
probably airing this weekend on a station near you, or you can just listen
to the show here on this site. That's free. You can also download
shows for a small fee or buy
CDs. There are Greatest
Hits CDs and other merchandise.
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The story of the night a tornado hit Hoisington, Kansas, is in the Prom
episode.
We have the themes because mostly they make it sound like
there's a reason to hear a story about, say, a contest where everyone stands
around a truck for days until one person is left standing ... or a grown
man trying to convince his friend that he has heard the greatest phone message
ever made ... or a man who's obsessed with Niagara Falls, lives minutes
from the Falls, writes and thinks about the Falls all the time, but who
can't bring himself to actually visit the Falls, because, as he says, "they've
ruined the Falls." If you're not doing stories about the news, or celebrities,
or things people have ever heard of elsewhere, you have to give people a
reason to keep listening. The themes make it seem like there is a reason.
We think of the show as journalism. One of the people who helped shape the
program, Paul Tough, says that what we're doing is applying the tools of
journalism to everyday lives, personal lives.
Which is true. It's also true that the journalism we do tends to use a lot
of the techniques of fiction: scenes and characters and narrative threads.
Meanwhile, the fiction we have on the show functions like journalism: it's
fiction that describes what it's like to be here, now, in America. What
we like are stories that are both funny and sad. Personal and sort of epic
at the same time.
Some of the writers whose work has been on the program: David Sedaris, Sarah
Vowell, Russell Banks, Dave Eggers, David Rakoff, Tobias Wolff, Jhumpa Lahiri,
Anne Lamott, Michael Lewis, Michael Chabon, Nick Hornby, Alex Kotlowitz,
Dan Savage, David Foster Wallace, Spalding Gray, Chris Ware, Gay Talese,
Haruki Murakami, Aimee Bender, Lydia Davis, Junot Diaz, Sherman Alexie,
Bill Buford.
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Michigan's Sarah York became General Manuel Noriega's pen pal in 1988. We
told her story in My
Pen Pal..
We view the show as an experiment. We try things. There
was the show where we taped for 24 hours in an all-night restaurant. And
the show where we put a band together from the musicians' classified ads.
And the show where we followed a group of swing voters for months, recorded
their reactions to everything that happened in the election up through their
final decision. And the show where one of our contributors went on a fast
to find out if, in fact, fasting leads to enlightenment as promised.
We sometimes think of it as a documentary show for people who normally hate
documentaries. A public radio show for people who don't necessarily care
for public radio.
In addition to the radio show, our staff has a movie deal with Warner Brothers
which may lead to stories from the radio show being made into motion pictures.
Bill
McKibben wrote about the show in our early days on the air. Marc
Fisher wrote this article about the journalism on the program. The
New York Times Magazine did a longish overview about the show.
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