IN POD WE TRUST
How Ira Glass took over the world with This American Life
Like many of us, Ira Glass is working from home during the coronavirus pandemic. For him, that means frequent spells shut in a closet. ‘‘It’s actually been very stressful,’’ he says, peering into a Google hangout call from his girlfriend’s New York City apartment, where they’re spending lockdown with her 6-year-old son. ‘‘There’s been no downtime.’’ Glass is the creator, executive producer and host of This American Life, one of the most popular podcasts in the world. His idiosyncratic nasal drawl is a weekly companion for millions of people around the globe, and has been for more than two decades. Glass, 61, has guided This American Life through almost every one of its 700 episodes. And a little thing like a global pandemic and a city under lockdown isn’t about to stop him. So he’s been stepping into the closet (for the soundproofing), shutting the door, and recording from home. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Glass’ parents wanted their middle child and only son to be a doctor. But at high school his interests lay with the school paper and the drama club, and by the time he graduated from university with a degree in semiotics, he’d decided he wanted a career in radio. He started with the National Public Radio (NPR) in Washington DC, first as an intern. He graduated to tape cutter, then reporter, then host of several shows before, in 1995, taking two months of unpaid leave to develop what would become This American Life. It launched in November that year and was an almost instant hit. For those of you who aren’t among the three million people worldwide who download This American Life every week (another two million or so listen to it on one of 500 radio stations in the United States), it’s a show based around journalism presented as compelling narrative stories. Typically, episodes have a theme and are split into three acts, each a different story linked to that theme. Although most are journalistic pieces, the show also features short stories, essays and plays. Episodes range from the humorous to the heartbreaking, to the downright absurd, and cover everything from politics to social justice, to personal memoirs and intimate family stories. Glass said the goal for any This American Life story was that it ‘‘unfold like a little movie’’. ‘‘We always have to organise around a person and what happens to them in the way that would happen if you were making a feature film.’’ Indeed, more than once This American Life stories have been adapted into movies. Most recently, Lulu Wang developed her story What You Don’t Know, which aired in 2016, into the critically acclaimed film The Farewell, which earnt actor Awkwafina a Golden Globe this year. What You Don’t Know is the story of Wang’s expatriate family fabricating a wedding in China so they could all see her grandmother one last time without telling the old woman she was dying. It’s a prime example of what This American Life does best – a personal story with universal themes, heartfelt, tender, funny, and surprising. It’s what listeners tune in for. It’s impossible not to be moved by it. This American Life isn’t always topical, but – and this is particularly true in the Trump era – it doesn’t shy away from politics and current events either. It certainly won’t ignore Covid-19, but the challenge, Glass says, is how to bring the show’s unique voice to what is, without doubt, the most discussed topic in the world right now. ‘‘For a show like ours it’s always a puzzle – what kind of coverage to do that will add to anybody’s information,’’ he says. ‘‘There’s such a saturation of coverage about this current moment and people are really interested in it, and some people are really taking it in. ‘‘It isn’t like [when we] take on a subject that people actually don’t care about or they don’t want to know about, and we’re just like, ‘No, we’re gonna teach you everything about this and you’re gonna f...ing love it.’ We do that sometimes, but this is not that. ‘‘Our audience knows a lot and so to figure out a corner of it where we feel like we can say something original – it’s a challenge.’’ The show began its most recent episode with a simple story, a classic This American Life-style tale. ‘‘We did a story where it was really one of our producers just talking to his brother-in-law,’’ Glass says. ‘‘He had coronavirus, his wife had coronavirus, [and] they had a 2-year-old who just didn’t understand what was going on. ‘‘They were really, really sick and he just described his experience of two parents, both very ill with this kid – what it’s like and what you think – in a way that I felt was very different from the other coverage, and with the intimacy that I think radio’s so good at, and that our show does.’’ I n the past 15 years or so, podcasting has gone from a fringe practice to ‘‘having a moment’’, to a fully established, significant element of the modern media landscape. And, like other media, it’s taking a hit. Although it’s easy to imagine that we’re all spending our lockdowns curled up on the couch, catching up on back episodes of WTF with Marc Maron, In Our Time or Crime Junkie (or whatever floats your boat), in fact, podcast consumption has dropped by about 20 per cent since the coronavirus pandemic took hold. ‘‘None of the advertisers on our show have cancelled yet, but since March we haven’t sold any new ads, which means that for the year overall we’re going to be down,’’ Glass says. ‘‘Our business is fine, we have cash reserves, we’re OK, but for shows like we make that have skilled, wellpaid people, we very much could be hurt by this in the way that a magazine could be.’’ There’s an impression, he says, that podcasts cost nothing to produce, but that’s not wholly accurate. ‘‘Sometimes people are taken in by the surface appearance of what podcasts are. We go out of our way to make everything we do seem like it’s just a person talking to you. ‘‘We write the scripts so it’s just like a person talking, and we perform them so it doesn’t sound like there are 30 people behind every word, and editors and mixers and people supervising the mixes, but all of it is there. It’s more of a machine than I think is apparent.’’ There are exceptions, he says, naming actor Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert among them, but a production like This American Life is closer to ‘‘a small magazine’’. Still, if you have the impression all podcasts are tiny affairs, ‘‘you’re taking the product as we intend it to be taken, so I can’t blame you’’. Glass attributed the current drop in podcast consumption to the change in routines. ‘‘If you’re used to listening to your podcasts on your commute or at the gym, like a bunch of the activities where you listen to the podcasts are gone and so the podcast listening is gone.’’ But he is confident it will pick up again. In fact, despite the screeds of think pieces contemplating how the pandemic could change society in the long-term, Glass thinks that once we come out of lockdown, it’ll be back to business as usual. ‘‘I remember when Hurricane Sandy hit New York [in 2012],’’ he says. ‘‘I was living in Manhattan and the power went out. At the time I was in a building with an elevator, [so you have to] walk up and down the stairs, and you have no power and you have no refrigerator. ‘‘We had a dog at the time, and you’re taking the dog down and bringing him up, and I just remember thinking I will never take for granted again the incredible convenience of walking into a room and turning on a light switch, and walking up to a machine that keeps food stored for days. I will never forget this, I will learn so much, it was sort of like the last scene of Our Town, the Thornton Wilder play or something. And really within a week, I would say, of the power coming back on it was like it had never happened.’’ He acknowledged, however, that he was among the lucky ones who had not lost anyone close to them or had their lives significantly negatively impacted. In the US, at time of writing, nearly 30,000 people have died of coronavirus. ‘‘We’re so lucky to even be able to speculate about what it’s going to be like after,’’ Glass says. ‘‘I also feel very aware of that, that my experience of this is just a very lucky version of it.’’
Podcasts will be back. Podcasts are far from dead. In fact, they’re one of the most expansive and innovative mediums out there, and This American Life has been at the forefront of that innovation. When its spinoff pod, Serial, was released in 2014, Glass says ‘‘the question we were trying to answer was, could you do a true story and have it continue for more than one week, and would people listen to the next episode? And could you tell a documentary over 12 episodes?’’ The answers were resoundingly yes. Serial, a feat of investigative journalism created and hosted by Sarah Koenig, explored the 1999 murder of an American high school student, and her ex-boyfriend’s conviction for the crime. It touched on race relations, the American justice scheme, shaming, and the fallibility of memory, and was an instant success. To date, it’s been downloaded more than 150 million times, and it catapulted the true crime genre to wild popularity. You can thank (or blame) it for the likes of Making a Murderer, The Jinx and lockdown obsession, Tiger King. Glass has a prediction for the next big trend in podcasting. ‘‘Nobody’s done a fiction podcast that’s as good as the best TV,’’ he says. ‘‘We live in this incredible golden age of television where
there’s so much experimentation and so many smart, talented people putting out stuff like Fleabag . . . shows that are so original. It’s so amazing what happens on TV right now and there’s no podcast that comes close.’’ Podcasts could benefit from the work TV has put in there. ‘‘You could hire the writers for the same amount of money as they get on TV and then just completely eliminate all the production costs. Rather than filming over 10 days, you could just tape for two hours with the actors, four hours probably, the whole episode. It’s so efficient. ‘‘You could get a great cast, because if you have a great script it’s so easy to do and so fun. That’s something that I feel like a bunch of us are watching.’’ Until then, though, Glass will be recording from his closet, or indulging his poker hobby by reading professional player Phil Gordon’s Little Green Book, or perhaps reading Daniel Pinkwater books to his girlfriend’s young son (Glass’ favourite is Ducks). ‘‘Living in isolation under lockdown, I feel sometimes like I’m on a tiny boat with my girlfriend and this 6-year-old, and we’ve set out on this really long ocean voyage,’’ he says. ‘‘It’s just the three of us, and we never leave this apartment, and we’re getting further and further out at sea, and it’s the part of the trip where you start to forget what it was like on land. Like I’m really losing touch with what my life before was, and my life before in no way seems better. ‘‘I don’t yearn for it, it’s like it didn’t even happen, and it’s going to feel like that once we all get back, too. ‘‘It’s going to be like, God, that was a weird blip, huh? And we’re gonna talk about it.’’ Sounds almost like a little movie, doesn’t it? A perfect story for This American Life.