In an interview
with Advocate.com, This American Life's
handsome host, Ira Glass, defends his decision to
bring his radio show to TV, reveals his favorite This
American Life stories, and admits how living
with the gym bunnies of Chelsea seriously messes with his
self-esteem.
With its folksy, funny, and sometimes heartbreaking
vignettes of everyday existence, radio program This
American Life—produced by Chicago Public Radio and
widely heard on National Public Radio—has
captivated listeners for over a decade. Now host
Ira Glass brings the program to Showtime, and talks
to The Advocate about everything from crazed
fans to Tyra Banks.
Hey, Ira. I just saw the whole series and I loved it.
Oh, thank you.
How much self-analyzing went into bringing the
radio show to TV? Was there a lot of inner turmoil?
[The ThisAmerican Life staff and I] believed it
would be impossible to do more self-analyzing than we
did. I feel like the staff and I took it as far as we
could possibly go because there was a long period where
Showtime was asking us to do [the TV show] and we
simply weren't sure it could be done at all. Once we
started working on the pilot, there was the incredibly
horrible process of figuring out the aesthetic of this thing
we were inventing. In the beginning we talked about doing a
lot of animation and a lot of fancy stuff, but in the
end we felt like that stuff wasn't as expressive for
what we wanted to do. In the end you want to come
to solutions that are simple.
Do you have a stock response that you keep
handy for the people who think you sold out by bringing
This American Life to TV?
I really need one, don't I? I mean, people
aren't saying to me, "You sold out." It's more like
people, the fans of ours, don't understand. It's total
incomprehension. It doesn't go as far as selling out.
Sometimes there's a feeling of betrayal because I think
there are still people who view anything to do with
television as just being bad. I feel that's a little
out of date, truthfully. Television has gotten so much
better in the last 10 years. But I think that still, for
many people, if it's television, that means it's a
force of evil. So when I'm getting this incredibly
skeptical response from our own fans, the thing I've been
saying is that we did this because we thought we could make
a nice show. We didn't do [the TV show] wanting to do
anything different. We thought we could make a show
that has exactly the feeling and the values of our
radio show. And it seemed worth trying.
So no nefarious reasons.
There's no dignity in saying this, but the radio show
had been on the air for over a decade, and it just
seemed like it would be fun to try something new. It
wasn't more complicated than that. We knew that we
weren't going to stop making the radio show, and it just
seemed like, well, we have this TV network that wants
to throw all this money not at us but at this project.
When do you get a chance like that? When we were doing
the pilot, we got all sorts of guarantees from the network,
like if we did the pilot and we found that the things
they needed for it to be a TV show were simply things
we didn't agree with, we could kill the whole project.
That's a lot of control.
In the end, they basically said, if we were going to be
unhappy with it, chances are they were going to be
unhappy with it too.
Do you believe the TV show packs the same punch as
the radio show?
If I didn't think that, we wouldn't be doing it.
The thing I would say to the radio listeners is, just
look at the preview online. I feel like once people
see that stuff they feel much more confident. We just did
this six-city tour, and I would say to the audience,
"Were you worried when you heard we were doing a TV
show?" In every city they roared back, "Yes!" In
Minnesota a guy yelled out, "Judas!"
The people in them all start out a little silly,
but by the end you've give them credence and the
audience is no longer judging them. How do you
manage to tell the stories without being
condescending? Is it in the stories you choose?
I don't think it's the stories we choose as much
as it is our general sense of aesthetics. I don't
think it's that interesting to laugh at people.
Stories are more interesting if you're empathizing. As soon
as you start empathizing, basically you've opened up
the entire world of feelings that are possible to have
as a person. If you're laughing at somebody, that's a
feeling, but it's a very finite feeling. I don't knock
reality shows. I watch those shows. I just feel like it's
human drama, and it's interesting, but that's not our
way.
I don't think people would be screaming "Judas" if
there was aTemptation Island 3.
Even with a pretty good show like Project
Runway there's a certain amount of laughing at a certain
character because they're just an ass. Runway
gets great when there is someone you really love and
you want to win. Of course you feel this about Tim
Gunn.
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Broverman is associate editor of The Advocate.