This American Life… On Your TV Box!

Maybe you’ve been listening for the last several weeks to the radio program, and actually sat through the credits. Or perhaps you visit the website for archives, and came across one of the various available YouTube trailers. Or, if you’re like me, you just so happened to be watching watching basic cable when one of their spots came on. If not, you probably had no idea that Chicago Public Radio’s This American Life is making the jump to television, airing the first of six episodes tonight at 10:30 pm ET on Showtime.

The most surprising thing to me? Ira Glass, far from having “a great face for radio”, is somewhat evocative of David Foley (if he had aged much better), maybe with a dash of John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants thrown in there for good measure. It’s gotta be the glasses.

Earlier I said it airs tonight, but — if you have a Digitial TV service with OnDemand — the first episode has actually been available since March 1st. I took at look at it yesterday.

The website for This American Life calls it, “a TV show that feels like the radio show, but isn’t just the radio show on TV,” which seems exactly right. For those who are unfamiliar with the radio show, the format is fairly straightforward: Ira introduces the theme for the episode, sometimes with a short interview, sometimes with a teaser for the first story, or quite often with a related anecdote. What follows are separate stories that fill up the hour (or in the case of the TV show, half-hour), seperated into “acts”, but unified into a common theme.

The first episode, “Reality Check”, is introduced with a story I’m already familiar with in the form of “graphic pee”. It’s one thing to hear about it in a radio interview, but quite another to see it lovingly rendered as an artistic, almost Flash-like, animation using photographed sprites; now that’s how you make a splash on television! In typical form, a story that on the surface seems to be about a farm couple and their beloved bull quickly turns to the bizarre: cloning. Finally, in a story that I’m glad has been committed to film (so that I can see these guys coming a mile away if I’m ever in New York), Improv Everywhere explains how they almost ruined the lives of a couple of startup musicians.

If you’ve been poring through the radio show archives for the last year like I have, then the stories from the first episode will already be familiar to you — maybe a little too familiar. It’s pretty evident that they lifted samples from the original radio interviews for use in the program. Even if you hadn’t heard them before, the clips — when used — are noticable. The voice of “Ira on camera” sounds distinctly different from the “Ira on radio” voice, resulting in sometimes jarring transitions betwen the familiar, fast-paced quips of a notable NPR personality… to this stranger I’ve never met before. Clearly, they went out and shot new video during production last year, which included some (almost literally) gut-wrenching events that did not occur in the radio broadcast. Still, the stories cover the same ground, but not all of the audio sounded like it had been re-recorded for the show, the “pee” story being chief among the examples.

Feel free to head over to Showtime’s nifty webpage for more details on the show. For more information on the Chicago Public Radio Show, or to listen to the archives (for free!) and/or purchase individual shows, head over the official This American Life website.

I feel like I’ve shared a very personal secret with you, now. Don’t go ruining it for me!