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.
