The 7 stories of This American Life
This American Life’s storytelling has become ubiquitous in the audio world in the past 25 years.
Its style is now deeply embedded in our expectation of longform audio stories — the soft marimba music, the lackadaisical whimsy, the framing of a story into a larger human truth — all of these things have an important role in conveying a story, emotion and more. Sometimes it makes us lose sight of whether it really was a good story, well told, instead opting for the vague sense of familiarity that it affords. And we really like familiar stories.
Stepping away from the style, we have the story. What is it that makes them so powerful? And why do they pick the stories they do?
Here’s how I think we can break it down.
Narratives
It’s actually quite hard to pin down exactly what makes a good story for the show, there are a lot of factors in play and even the “American” part of the story isn’t always present. I think they can be split into 7 key types:
A Day in Your Shoes
These stories immerse you in a topic by literally hanging out with the protagonists and seeing what makes them tick. They’re interested in the minutiaue of the day-to-day workings of, usually, fairly average Americans. There’s no big wow moment to any individual event, but collected together they often form something with a little hint of magic.
Sometimes these are referred to as “Capsule” stories — like they’re a little time capsule of moment and place. I like that.
Great examples of this genre:
24 Hours in the Golden Apple — We spend all day and all night in an open-all-hours diner in Chicago. We hear the ebb and flow of different customer patterns, professionals, regulars and people’s love lives unfolding. Beautiful.
129 Cars — A month in a car dealership. Can they make their target? What shenanigans are at play to do so? Here we get the full range of ups and downs of a sales team desperate to make their goal and get a bonus, working together and pulling all of the tricks to the month’s end.
Familiarity Breeds Contempt
These stories can take a few different forms, but usually they follow something that seems totally normal that has an unexpected consequence. It could be that the normal thing is happening in a strange place. It might be that the normal thing is itself a very weird thing to do, when you actually examine it. It could be that you take something mundane and push it to extremes.
Examples:
I Am The Eggplant — Could you spend a month on your own in your apartment? Tricky, right? What if the only way to get food was through magazine sweepstakes? One Japanese comedian took an unwitting trip down that alley.
Return to Childhood — Is your memory of childhood really accurate? In this episode Jonathan Katz investigates this through found sound and visits to childhood homes, only to find they both have very different memories of what this was like.
The Uncuttable Tape
This American Life loves bureaucracy. Often these stories focus on how bureaucracy can get in the way in the most infuriating scenarios. The ones where the system that’s supposed to help has the opposite effect. We’ve all experienced those things, but we don’t often step back to understand why this helpful thing is broken, and that’s what these episodes try to do.
Examples:
The Hills Have Eyes — This one is such a drama. You’re bitten by a Raccoon and it just won’t quit. It turns out it’s rabid, once the initial drama of the attack is over you’ve got a classic TAL bureaucracy crisis. You need treatment fast, but can you get it on a public holiday?
Abdi the American — Abdi is part of the Golden Ticket lottery for US citizenship. He has an amazing opportunity that his friends and family are jealous of, but that’s the only luck he has. At every step he is thwarted by forms and rules, while fearing for his life.
Delight in Mediocrity
Here’s a totally tedious thing that you do, or your family enjoys, placed in a setting which makes the whole thing seem just a little bit insane. You take an unjustified amount of joy in something that is hard to understand or communicate to someone else. You probably can’t even get your best friend to take part. And yet this thing you love has such a draw for you that even talking about it gets you so excited that you can’t speak through laughter. We want to know why the fuck you care so much.
Examples:
The Land of Make Believe — This is one of my all-time favourite stories. A classic childhood tale taken way too far. A father builds a ship in the yard for his kids to play on. He’s in the Navy, so he does it right. He also has a lot of kids, and really this is a great way to have them take care of each other. That includes the night watch, keeping track of dental and doctors appointments and if you want to leave the crew, you’d better have the right form.
The Feather Heist — Fly tying could sound pretty boring to most of us, but there’s a certain sedate appeal to a hobby like this. What I never knew was that for the Big Dogs this is no game. You’d better tie those flies with the right feathers, even if that bird is extinct and the only place you could get them is by breaking into a museum at night. It feels like a kid stealing candy, but it’s actually a million dollar heist.
Through Victims’ Eyes
Often heartbreaking. Understanding what it’s like to be the person on the other side of bureaucracy which is functioning as intended, and preventing you from doing something as a result.
They can also be simple tales helping us to understand what motivates people to actions that we might not take, like the Hong Kong protests. At their heart these stories have someone facing a problem and they’re often powerless. The system will decide, or sometimes directly repress, the outcome, which seems to form the natural justice. But you can’t access it, because someone doesn’t want you to.
Examples:
The Problem We All Live With Part One — This one made me cry. As a teacher I’ve seen some of the inequalities in education in the UK first hand, but hearing how one school district went to alarming lengths to try to exclude black communities is heartbreaking. If you listen to only one episode in this list, make it this one.
Umbrellas Up — We follow protestors in Hong Kong, framed in the coming of age of many of those involved, who feel betrayed over the freedom they were promised as children.
What Happens When…?
This takes a scenario that we’re so familiar with that we don’t even question it. It’s just the way things work, and we’ve never wondered why that is. It might uncover the truth of why a particular system works the way it does, often discovering that it was designed to tackle a completely different problem from the one we now use it for, or it could be when you make a change in your own life that seems minor, but has a huge shift in how you view and interact with the world. Maybe you’re a responsible person who is trying to help, but the problem is almost too small for you, and it all goes to shit.
Examples:
Americans in Paris — David Sedaris has moved to Paris and finding a way to learn the language and fit into the culture in a way that can match his own ideosyncracies is a great trip. Why would you go to the Louvre when it’s the one place in Paris that you can’t smoke? Times have moved on a lot since this was first aired, but the sense of place is still brilliant.
Fiasco! — The police show up to solve a problem. They’re the best people for the job, right? Well, you’ve got a raccoon in your attic, so someone else would be better. But you’re a good looking girl and the young cops are eager to please. It turns out it’s only a squirrel, but he’s fast, he’s not in the attic any more and he’s also on fire.
Culture Shift
This is similar to the bureaucracy stories in that it is fighting against something that you are relatively powerless to change. That something, in this case, isn’t necessarily government or bureaucracy, but it could be the softer structures that underpin that way of working.
It could be changing a culture in a workplace, it might be helping a friend to understand what racism feels like or it could be pushing back at the expectations of a teacher. The fact that these structures are “softer” often makes them harder to articulate and change.
Examples:
Five Women — A really powerful account of dealing with one man. Speaks to attitudes that will sadly be familiar to many women, and a kind of power that is more than bureaucracy. The individual experiences feel wrong, but they’re hard to deal with, the collective picture is even more alarming.
Ask Not For Whom The Bell Tolls — Online culture is pretty cruel, but there are always real people behind the trolls. Here a victim of this culture speaks to the abusers. Can they change their ways? Is it just a game to them?
It’s All About Bureaucracy
The central issues at stake in This American Life stories are often common, even if they’re hard to spell out.
The best stories transgress these boundaries and seep into each other. The best episodes mix the categories together.
We get the pathos and the bathos and leave with the sense that we’ve seen a part of the world in a new way. I love that. Stories are, for me, a very grounding thing. It’s how my world makes sense.
At its heart though, This American Life is about bureaucracy in all of its forms. From the time you’re told to go to bed as a kid, to the rules you unwittingly follow because that’s what you do, to the rules that are designed to discriminate
Sometimes it’s unfair, sometimes it’s criminal, often it’s hilarious when you pick it apart. But it’s all human. It’s that sense of being a part of a larger whole that draws me back.
Am I Right?
I like thinking about these things, but I can’t claim to have it all worked out. Are there This American Life stories which don’t fit into these categories? Got something else to add?
For more like this you can follow me on Twitter, or drop me an email with your ideas: hello@wiltreasure.co.uk.
