Hosts Lulu Miller and Alix Spiegel are well-suited to present these kinds of stories. Public radio listeners will recognize them from shows each helped create and regularly contributed to: Radiolab and This American Life. Drawing from the storytelling aspect of both series, which regularly would focus on a specific topic and then find multiple angles around said topic, Invisibilia interweaves personal stories and dynamic new psychological and brain science. However, it will not be dry and clinical, and sometimes it might shock you.
For illustrative purposes, the first episode is summarized as: Are our dark thoughts about ourselves a reflection of some kind of inner reality about us? Do we need to pay attention and be guided by them, or should we just ignore them? Without giving too much away, the first show is broken into two character studies, each delving into a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). In specific to the first of the two stories, a man is plagued by thoughts of doing harm, thoughts he finds frightening, abhorrent, and uncontrollable. The question of whether that does, or does not, indicate something about him internally gets at what the show is all about.
New Jersey Stage spoke with Alix Spiegel and Lulu Miller to find out more about this intriguing new series.
For anyone who has not yet heard the show, could you describe the premise of Invisibilia?
Alix Spiegel: Invisibilia is a show about all the invisible things that shape human behavior, stuff like thoughts and emotions, beliefs and assumptions, and all those things you can't physically lay out on a table but which have a huge impact on your day to day life.
Lulu Miller: To understand how those things shape our experience, we talk to scientists and people with really unusual experiences, and weave it all together in a way that we think is compelling, and sometimes just funny. There's a lot of lightness in the shows even though we sometimes talk about dark stuff.
Having come from two successful public radio programs, what was the impetus to create a new one? How long did it take to get from inception to first episode?
Alix: Well, we met about two years ago, and when we met, it wasn't as if we just sat down and decided to create a show. We met at this public radio conference called Third Coast, and at the time I was interested in learning new radio techniques and Lulu knew how to do a whole bunch of fancy radio stuff that I didn't know how to do. So there was this story that I really wanted to do, and I asked her to work on it with me, as a producer.
At the time she was finishing up graduate school for creative writing, but was thinking about eventually getting back into radio, so she said yes. And once we went to do the reporting it was just incredibly easy and kind of ridiculous fun, and basically just grew from there. It was so much fun that we just kept on going and our editor/co-creator at NPR - Anne Gudenkauf - helped guide it until eventually we just had a show. That was two years ago, and it took a while to get her to move to Washington, but eventually she did. I would say that though we've been working on mostly part-time because we were both doing news, it's taken about 18 months or maybe a little bit more to get us from the beginning to this season.
What kind of effort -- if any -- was there to make sure Invisibilia had its own identity? While it shares elements with This American Life and Radiolab, in that there is an exploration of an idea or concept through stories, This American Life and Radiolab both have very unique ways about it. Judging from the first episode, Invisibilia has its own way in. Was it difficult to get to that point?
Alix: It did take a long time to figure out how to combine our different approaches to radio. We just had such different ways of going about it. At first I tried to learn the Lulu way, then she tried to learn the way that I do it, and then we finally developed this synthesis of the two I would say. But the truth is that it continues to evolve, pretty much every show we are experimenting with something different and I expect that to continue hopefully forever. Now I think the show has its own sonic identity and also has its own kind of intellectual approach as well.
On those lines, while both of you have done on-air segments on your shows, you were both primarily producers. You know about the presenter's role but it hadn't been your main responsibility, but now it is. What is it like to become the voices of this program, as opposed to being the occasional voices for the others?
Alix: That's an interesting question, but I don't know how interesting an answer I have. I can say that Lulu and I did a lot of experimenting with what would work for us as hosts - what the right position for us was. In the beginning we talked about it a lot and even did stuff like - we both took a comedy improv class together - which was really fun, but who knows how it's affected the end product? But after a while I think we just kind of forgot about it and just focused on trying to be ourselves, and do things that we found funny or interesting, and that's when I think that it started to work.
What kind of pitch did you have to make to get NPR on board?
Alix: Lulu, Anne and I made two pilot episodes while we were also doing news reporting. We sort of made them after-hours and in-between the cracks, and then finally shared them with the people at NPR who make decisions. They were all incredibly kind and supportive about everything, and helped us think through how to go forward, and what was working, and what wasn't.
Did you learn lessons from the previous shows that you were able to apply to Invisibilia? Things that you kept in the back pocket and said, "We are never, ever, no way, doing that."
Alix: I gotta say working at This American Life was one of the best things that ever happened to me, and I didn't walk away with much in the way of - never going to do that. The only thing that I can think of that falls into that category for me are the hours that (TAL host) Ira Glass worked. He worked CRAZY hours. C-R-A-Z-Y.
Lulu: Actually, mine is the same answer! Darn lucky to have ever ended up at Radiolab, changed me and my ability to tell stories unthinkably, but I'll add two or three more "As" to the C-R-A-A-A-A-Z-Y of hours worked there.
Now that the show is about to get up and running, do you feel that those "never evers" may inevitably creep back?
Alix: In the last month the hours have been pretty bad, but I'm crossing my fingers that this is just a phase that we are passing through and a more sane life awaits in the near future ('she said as the clock reading 11:30 pm blinks just to the side of her computer.')
Without giving away too much to those who haven't heard it yet, the first episode deals with a topic that I think most people deal with to a lesser degree. However, in the show, individuals are dealing with it on a much heightened scale. I admit that is vague to the uninitiated, but the point is that you find yourself (yourselves) communicating with folks who initially could be seen as being kind of scary if listeners didn't stick with the narrative all the way through. Was there any trepidation in telling that story, initially, even though you know how it will resolve?
I think we felt it was important to tell the story because by telling it we thought:
1) That it would help people to see their thoughts differently, and
2) That it would help to demystify and regularize OCD with harming obsessions, which is something that people absolutely should not be afraid of.
With this in mind, will future episodes also dig into topics that could be as uncomfortable?
Alix: A number of the shows feature stories that are about people with conditions most people have never heard of. And we talk to people who have these experiences because it helps us to step back and talk about the broader issues that affect us all. I think you're right - we don't do it in a sensationalistic way at all - we do it because it helps us to talk about broader issues that are difficult to see and talk about.
Can you let our readers know what future topics are coming up for the show?
Alix: We have a show about expectations which features this man who is blind who makes a (strangely convincing) argument that if the world just had different expectations of people who are blind that blind people could - in a very real way - come to see. We are doing a show about fear which features a woman who is biologically incapable of fear. And we are doing a show about computers – which, okay, aren't really invisible, but the way that they affect us often is.
Invisibilia, like many NPR programs, will also be a podcast. Podcasting is becoming a powerful medium in its own right, and doesn't have to conform to restrictions that a radio program might, as dictated by FCC standards. How does that affect your show which is essentially both?
Alix: Well since we are both, we are still conforming to radio standards. Not sure how that will work in the future but this time out we're essentially functioning like Snap Judgment, or TAL and Radiolab or 99% Invisible or any other podcast which also lives on radio.
Will there be content that falls outside of the standard broadcasts?
Alix: We are also creating Invisibilia content which will air on NPR's news magazine shows - All Things Considered and Morning Edition. About half of that content appears in some form on our actual show and half is completely new.
What is the long-term plan for the show, or is it a matter of "let's get through season one first, please" at the moment?
Alix: I think the plan is to get through season one and see how the whole thing flew. Then - after a short vacation to the tropics - decide what we're going to do. But at this point our main focus is:
a) Finishing, and then
b) Lying on a beach.
Thanks again to Alix Spiegel and Lulu Miller for their time, as well as Isabel Lara for facilitating our conversation. Invisibilia airs on participating public radio member stations.
