This American Life, Episode 241: 20 Acts in 20 Minutes

For this post I’m focusing on Episode 241 of This American Life, originally broadcasted on July 11, 2003, hosted by Ira Glass.  For the first post, I listened to the first episode; for this one, I’ve chosen Episode 241: 20 Acts in 60 Minutes because I wanted to explore how the show manages to maintain continuity and identity in a format that’s very different from their typical structure.  Most often they start with an introduction, then go into four (sometimes three) “acts”, segments 10-35 minutes long that cover a particular aspect of or angle on that episode’s theme.  Occasionally the entire episode is devoted to a single exceptionally complex or powerful story.  But episode 241 has a prologue and twenty acts–twenty very short stories, not directly related at all.  I did read the transcripts of one podcast from each year in between the first episode in 1995 and this one in 2003, and what I got from that was that this episode wasn’t totally out of the blue–in a way it built on trends that the podcast already had.  Over time I noticed faster cuts in between Glass and the guests speaking, more back-and-forth even when the guest’s piece was prerecorded and they weren’t really talking to each other.  There seems to be an increasing (and, in my opinion, justified) hesitancy to let any one person, either Glass or a guest, go on for too long uninterrupted.  I did hear one of these monologue segments in Your Dream, My Nightmare (1997), and it stood out to me because it wasn’t the norm for the show at the time.  In this case, the guest was a performer and a poet by trade, so his voice and storytelling manner was engaging and interesting, but the default at this time does seem to have been more cutting back and forth from one speaker to another.

There are a few techniques and devices that This American Life uses to create continuity and a sort of brand identity, many of which were not affected by this episode’s unusual structure.  Firstly, Ira Glass personally has a lot to do with the cohesion of the show.  He doesn’t necessarily take up a huge fraction of the airtime, but he’s a constant at the beginning and end of each episode, and he pops in at the beginning of most acts at the very least.  Because he does a lot of signposting about where the episode is going and what’s about to happen, it feels like he’s our guide through the podcast.  Other people usually tell the stories, and sometimes it’s even someone else doing the interviewing, but it’s always Glass telling us what’s going on, giving us context, creating structure.  His presence grounds the listener and helps bring about a sense of familiarity among the diverse themes of the episodes.

The biggest brand identity-related thing I noticed from the episodes I listened to was that, starting as soon as a year since the beginning of the podcast, Glass already had a much clearer idea of what the point and conceit of This American Life was than he did in the first episode.  In the 1996 episode Sissies, he says “Each week on our program, of course, we choose some theme and bring you documentaries, monologues, overheard conversations, found tape, found text, anything we can think of on that theme.”   He repeats a close variation of this in most of the episodes I listened to, including 20 Acts in 60 Minutes.  Here, he ties this episode to the usual structure while also describing how it’s different: “Instead of our usual– each week we choose a theme, bring you three or four stories, blah, blah, blah, public radio, very reflective, what kinds of stories would we end up with if we did 30 in one hour? Or even 20?”  Glass now has a solid idea of what This American Life is trying to do, and he tells you, frequently.  That goes a long way towards building that strong identity in the listeners’ minds.

Another point of consistency between this episode and the rest is that there’s always a funny quote from a guest at the very end of the broadcast, as the second-to-last sentence, and they do that in 20 Acts in 60 Minutes too–the chosen line was “I think it was right around the time we had this big fight about gumballs, which I’m not going to get into because it’s pretty embarrassing.”  It’s a small thing, but it’s essentially the last thing listeners hear, so it can stick in people’s minds.  It’s quite clever, because it serves the dual purpose of calling back to specific content from this one episode while also being reminiscent of the last line of every episode and, again, building that strong identity.

The creation and handling of this episode’s unique structure was very intentional; from the way Glass talks about it, it’s obvious that a lot of thought went into making it work and making it entertaining.  Just inserting my own personal opinion, I thought it was great.  I said in the first episode that I found Glass’ self-aware meta interludes tiresome because the show was already so long and unable to be sped up, and the structure of this episode is the perfect remedy for that.  Everything moves so quickly that there’s little time to dwell on how the podcast is going (though Glass certainly manages some of that, with the little “very reflective” in his description of a typical episode as well as occasional asides about how pleased he is with the pace they’re keeping).  18 minutes in, Glass takes thirty seconds to greet any listeners who came in late and describe the special format of this episode and how it’s different from a normal episode again.  28 minutes in, he does it one more time.  This is another way he reinforces the podcast’s identity even while making such an incongruous episode, and an example of how carefully the writers worked to prevent any confusion on the part of regular listeners.  Each act also has a descriptive title which Glass reads before it starts, and that again prevents confusion and disorientation between all these two- and three-minute segments.  Some of them, frankly, are not interesting at all.  Act four is quite literally “One time I was at the beach and I went too far into the water and I waved to my friend on the shore for help but she thought I was just waving to say hi.”  And then Glass ends that act by saying that the woman who was telling this story had since passed away.  That’s the whole thing.  However, the snappy pace and different narrator for each act mean that when a story isn’t good, it isn’t very important because you’ll be hearing something completely different within a couple minutes.  In addition, the stories might not be directly related, but they definitely put them in this order for a reason–a story about how a dog got his name followed by a story about a pet store, two stories about meeting strangers in a row, two stories that involve lying in a row.  This is yet another strategy that works to prevent confusion and create some semblance of a narrative arc even within a structure that made that quite difficult to do.

Overall, I genuinely enjoyed most of this episode (which…might perhaps be some kind of reflection on shortening attention spans in the social media age), and I was impressed with the little techniques the producers used to connect it to the other episodes and strengthen the podcast’s overall identity.  

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