For years I’ve been telling anyone who will listen that public radio’s This Amer­i­can Life was ready for a take­down. Some aspir­ing social critic would come along and dig a dirty nail into the rind of every hipster’s favorite radio show, peel it to show how mawk­ish, vain, and gaw­daw­fully sen­ten­tious the whole pro­duc­tion can be, and even pos­si­bly con­vince some­one at NPR or APM or wher­ever they make these things that yes, in fact, you might be able to do better than Ira Glass. After Curtis White went after Fresh Air and n+1 attacked McSweeney’s, TAL seemed the only low-​hanging fruit left for the knocking. 

Well, here it is, cour­tesy of Michael Hirschorn at The Atlantic.

And though I wish it were oth­er­wise, I can’t say I’m impressed. Forget the coarse and unhelp­ful cat­e­gory of “quirk” (Jonathan Safran Foer shar­ing oxygen with Wes Ander­son?) and the for­mu­la­tions (”TAL…is really the oppo­site of doc­u­men­tary reportage. It’s more like sociology,” ”that hoary emo­tion called sentiment”) that sound as silly as TAL’s own self-​congratulations (”what we’re doing is apply­ing the tools of jour­nal­ism to every­day lives”). The major prob­lem is that Hirschorn only scratches where he ought to maim. As Emer­son told Oliver Wen­dell Holmes: if you strike at a king you must kill him.