Glass on glass

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 I feel that's a little out of date, truthfully.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.