VIDEO: The trailer for This American Life with Ira Glass
Public radio has a number of gritty survival skills. One of these is the ability to fly under the pop-culture radar like an ambiguously cool former classmate. By offering fresh content daily without stirring from its understated routine, public radio avoids both the pressures of elite popularity and the humiliation of rejection. Why waste keystrokes on NPR when the real low drama can be found on American Idol? All this left me secure in the knowledge that This American Life (TAL), a PRI-distributed program beloved by its 1.7 million listeners, would remain one of the few exceptional, unfuckwithable things left in the arts world that truly didn’t deserve a hype-induced backlash. Until now.
Just over a year ago, TAL relocated from its original home in Chicago — where it’s been on the air since 1995 — to New York City. After signing a contract with Showtime, Ira Glass — TAL’s creator and host — and his colleague toiled to produce the radio show in addition to the first season of a television series based on the radio show’s æsthetic. (The Showtime series debuts March 22 at 10:30 pm.) When I first heard about the deal, I was filled with a sense of delirious promise, then an unforgiving, clammy horror. Many of my favorite novels have been ruined by a dreadful film adaptation, with anecdotes and characters stripped down to a few dull nuts and bolts. And television, that unpredictable, gorgeously fickle picture box, has a way of self-destructing just as it exhibits the potential to be wonderful.
Glass anticipated these fears before TAL’s cultish fans could start hand wringing. “When Showtime first came to us, we were really trying to blow them off,” he says when I reach him over the phone in New York. “You know, we’re public broadcasters. We were very suspicious of commercial TV.” Now, however, he’s confident in what he’s created; he believes that no devotee of the radio show could be disappointed in the television series, and that “if people see it, then we’ll win them over.” As we speak, he’s preparing to finish the last leg of TAL’s recent live tour, “What I Learned from Television,” which doubled as a grassroots promotion for the series. At the Opera House on February 27, Glass asked a mixed crowd of bookish types whether we worried when we heard TAL was expanding to television. Half the audience waved their hands in the air and muttered to themselves. It was worse in other cities. “In Minneapolis we were heckled so much that at one point, Chris Wilcha, my director, said, ‘It’s like you’re Dylan and you’re going electric. And you know, then we showed some clips, and when we were done showing the clips, they cheered like crazy.”
At 48, Glass is tall and slim, with spiky hair and a pair of retro coke-bottle glasses that give him the air of a 1950s news broadcaster. His voice betrays nothing of his aging-hipster appearance. It’s a voice you would make fun of if it weren’t so lovably dorky: high and nasally, inconsistently lispy, fragile when it needs to be. Unlike the majority of public radio heavyweights, with their holy-sounding vocals and clear-pitched intonations, Glass serves up sentences punctuated by pauses, ums, backtracking explanations, and self-conscious chuckles. On paper, he probably seems like the last person fit to host an hour-long public radio show. Once you hear him, you couldn’t imagine anyone else doing his job.
