With Podcast Canon, Benjamin Cannon analyzes the history of podcasts and interrogates how we talk about the art form.
In December of 1995, Your Radio Playhouse broadcast its first episode on Chicago’s NPR affiliate station WBEZ. Though it wasn’t long for this world—by the following year, after just 16 episodes, it would disappear with a startling completeness—Your Radio Playhouse would become perhaps the most important show in the history of modern audio storytelling. That’s because, on March 21st of 1996, its host, Ira Glass, changed the program’s name to This American Life.
And so, for this month’s entry into the Podcast Canon, we’re taking a step outside of our usual remit of shining a brighter light on the medium’s unjustly overlooked works and going deep on what is likely the most (justly) recognized work in the world of narrative documentary audio on the event of its 30th anniversary. Or, rather, the 30th anniversary of its renaming.
It might seem a little strange to fixate on something as simple as this change in appellation, but one feels the show wouldn’t exist today without it. Shakespeare may contend that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but Your Radio Playhouse just wasn’t something suited for longevity. This American Life is a title as bold as the enterprise itself, one almost purpose-built to endure. That small tweak helped the show become like the audio world equivalent to Saturday Night Live: an institution, guided by a charismatic figurehead with an uncanny ability for finding and fostering incredible talent, which singlehandedly reshaped our entire conception of an artform.
If you’re somehow unaware of the program, I’m overwhelmingly excited for you to discover it. This American Life is a work of narrative audio documentary, each episode runs about an hour long, focusing on a single theme. An episode could be devoted to a single story, or composed of a number of shorter ones, designated as acts. Those are the bare facts of the series, but what that misses is the way that the show’s creative team are simply obsessed with stories and storytelling. As a product of terrestrial radio, the program cracked the code on how to capture an audience’s attention and hold them there to the very end, a necessity in waning days of the broadcast monoculture, before the advent of the podcast and on-demand listening behavior.
It was, and still is, the show’s x-factor. The stories heard on TAL are often a masterclass in how to report, write, and edit for audio. They’re focused, fact-based journalism, yet somehow provide room for color and dynamism. More than that, they almost always contain an element of surprise, whether it’s in the choice of topic or some detail which pops up along the way. That this standard hasn’t dipped over the past three decades is more than admirable, it’s evidence of an incredibly committed team working from a place of love and care, for the craft and for each other. How else to explain the collaborative spirit which has endured for these decades?
Like an audio version of Charlamagne, one can trace a staggering amount of the developments of modern podcasting directly back to the program. There are the obvious hits, like producers Sarah Koenig, Dana Chivvis, and Julie Snyder’s landmark series Serial—the 10th anniversary of which served as the impetus for this column. But also, Alix Spiegel co-created NPR’s Invisibilia, Brian Reed took true crime in new directions with the novelistic S-Town, and Alex Blumberg, who first co-created NPR’s Planet Money in 2008 before attempting TAL-level storytelling at scale as the co-founder of Gimlet Media.
Gimlet set the tone for the medium’s mid-2010s boom times before a quiet implosion following its sale to Spotify. The studio functioned in part as a showcase for the voices of TAL’s most ambitious producers, including past Podcast Canon entrants like Jonathan Goldstein’s Heavyweight and Starlee Kine’s Mystery Show. It’s only fitting, then, that a number of the show’s current staff, like Emanuele Berry and Sarah Abdurrahman, came to the show from Gimlet productions. Words fail to encapsulate how somehow soul-nourishing that is to me, to see the way inspiration externalizes itself from the whole, before becoming reabsorbed back into the main body. The principles of energy conservation seemingly extend to creative energies as well. They are neither created nor destroyed, but shared.
Not to say that all of that medium’s biggest players were part of the show’s team, but most of a certain vintage were directly inspired by or worked with those individuals. TAL was just so instantly unique that it became the standard bearer for artfully abstract approaches to radio making. In its early days—before it had a sizable back catalog to play when stories were taking longer to report and produce—the team relied on a deep bench of contributors to fill out each episode’s various acts. People like Scott Carrier, David Rakoff, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, Sarah Vowell, Jay Allison, and David Sedaris. Each with approaches that were wildly different from each other and hardly the norm for audio storytelling at the time. Over time, those features also grew to include highlighting superlative works from the show’s podcast contemporaries, helping to signal boost lesser well-known but important programs and producers.
It’s another way the series finds common kinship with SNL: Each listener will have a different crop of producers and contributors temporally linked to the time when they fell in love with the program, their guys, in the parlance of Marc Maron’s WTF interviews. Another, more direct overlap, came when longtime SNL cast member Fred Armisen guest hosted with Glass on an episode about Doppelgängers, performing as Glass.
As with any show that has run for as long as TAL, one begins to perceive boundaries demarcating distinct eras, akin to the strata in sedimentary rock. The show shifted tonally near the close of its first decade, as America entered into its fraught conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. And a few years after that, the show almost jumped the shark in attempting to make the transition into television.
The moment immediately following that foray felt like the show ramping up into its imperial period, one that would last up to the 2016 election. This was when podcasts went big, thanks in no small part to the team from the show itself. There were live broadcasts to movie theaters, original songs from the toast of Broadway composers and lyricists, an expansion into movie production. These were some of the highest highs and incidentally lowest lows, like when in 2012 they ended up retracting an entire episode—”Mr. Daisey & The Apple Factory”—after its airing when it was discovered that its subject Mike Daisey had fabricated numerous details in his account of a trip to a Foxconn manufacturing facility in China that produced Apple products. If one is feeling particularly high on their ability to ascribe causation onto past events, there’s a convincing case to be made connecting the fallout from that episode to producers Brian Reed and Robyn Semien launching their podcast Question Everything over a dozen years later.
The post-Serial frenzy saw the team continue to explore the space of what documentary audio could be, notably with its second spin-off series, S-Town, a sort of Truman Capote via William Faulkner approach that was as popular as it was polarizing. The focus of the show in the first Trump administration swung solidly more towards its journalistic impulses, when it felt like documenting the excesses and abuses of power might have some positive effect. Then came #MeToo, and COVID, the war in Gaza, and now the second Trump administration. It’s been a lot, but the work being done, by producers Zoe Chace, Chana Joffe-Walt, Aviva DeKornfeld—all Planet Money alums as well!—and Miki Meek, finds a striking degree of humanity between the events of a story and the lives of the people it’s happening to.
If anything, I’m writing this as much for me as for you. In the 12 years since I’ve been covering podcasts for this publication, I had to put a pin in my listening to the program like I used to. TAL meant so much to me as a kid in the Chicago suburbs, a program of unimaginable quality and depth and brilliance, so I listened to it nonstop. But when I began to look at the world of podcasts from a place of discovery and promotion of lesser-known works, it was the obvious choice to set aside. And along the way, it began to feel like it had become a sort of éminence grise of the podcasting world, a victim of its own success. Had this program become such an institution that it no longer mattered in the broader cultural conversation?
I had been chasing the new and different and strange without realizing that it was all still to be found in This American Life. So, I tapped back in, listened to hundreds of hours of the program and was blown away. The show is not the same show that I grew up with, necessarily I would say. To remain preserved in amber would be another way of saying that it had calcified, stopped trying new things, and that’s the very modus operandi of the program. But what it has become is in no way less than its previous iterations. There will come a time when Glass will have to step away from the show, but if the actions of his television counterpart, Lorne Michaels, are any indication, it won’t be for another 20 years or more, god willing.
There is a challenge inherent in attempting to assess a work as thorough and massive as this one, in that there’s no succinct reading or encapsulation that one can arrive at without it being reductive. The show has nearly 900 episodes of an almost hilariously kaleidoscopic variety. But I say this as someone who has been a professional close watcher of podcasting since 2014: For as much as the tendrils of this show have snaked out across the landscape, for as many people and productions there are that have been inspired by its format, editorial sensibilities, and storytelling approach, no one has managed to best the narrative documentary form quite like Ira Glass and his team. Several have gotten close, from Glynn Washington with Snap Judgment, Al Letson with Reveal, or Roman Mars at 99% Invisible. Sadly, at the rate of contraction we’re seeing in the audio world, there will be fewer and fewer opportunities for anyone to ever replicate these luminaries’ successes.
Also, I’d be remiss to not mention that this year marks another 30 year celebration, for an institution equally near and dear to my heart: this very website. While the publication traces its origins to the early ’90s, it wasn’t until 1996 that The A.V. Club was made available online. I want to take this time to thank all of the readers who have helped to make the site one of the primary destinations for podcast coverage over the years. Big thanks to our founder Stephen Thompson, Editor-in-chief Danette Chavez, and former editors Kyle Ryan, Becca James, and Marnie Shure for helping to launch and grow the critical podcast writing on the site.
Come back next month as we get back to celebrating the cult-classics of the podcast world by diving into our first true crime entry into the Canon. We’ll be dissecting the wonderfully hard-boiled Empire On Blood, a narrative documentary in the mold of an Elmore Leonard novel.
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