Radio on the TV

[March 21st, 2007] Ask anybody what's so great about the public-radio program This American Life, and they'll tell you, "It's the stories." But it isn't the stories. It's true that once a week, for a dozen years running, host Ira Glass and his team of correspondents have uncovered some amazing tales: felons performing Shakespeare, babysitters for imaginary children and "the greatest phone message of all time." What makes the show so transfixing, however—what places it a frequency band apart from disposable NPR reportage—is the voice of the storytellers. It's an outlook at once curious, skeptical and delighted by ironies. The best quality of This American Life is the same as any good essayist: it never settles for the obvious.

So the Showtime network has done the obvious thing, and brought Glass and Co. to television. It's a move that has fans anxious. Nearly everyone I've told about the new series has asked, "How is it?" with fear in their eyes—palpable, quaking fear. So, quickly to the good news: Five of the first six episodes scheduled to run this spring do justice to the spirit of the radio show, and are as terrific as anything on TV.

It helps that Glass' team has stuck to its forte. The episodes are still essays, not documentaries: they remain divided into two or three acts, they all revolve around a single theme, and that premise develops, ever so quietly, into a life lesson. The revised program hasn't ventured far afield in its musings, either: The first Showtime episode contains two stories told on the airwaves in 2005. A rancher who loves his Brahma bull, Chance, so much that he clones him (and names him, naturally, Second Chance) is followed by a New York City improv group who momentarily convinces an obscure rock band that it has become instantly popular. Both tales suffer a hair in visual translation—the images sometimes rush the storytelling along too quickly—but the sense of wonder is the same.

So, too, is the acute perception. In the fourth episode, "God's Close-Up," Glass profiles a group of devout Roman Catholics who gather in the Mojave Desert to take Polaroids of the sun in hopes of seeing the Virgin Mary. He doesn't mock them, or talk about the obvious absurdity of the revelation. Instead, he asks the right question: "Of course if God is everywhere, and you already believe in God, no question about that, why do you need a picture?" And he gets interesting answers.

Not every query is this spot-on. (The third episode, a profile of a miserable family headed by an alcoholic ex-musician, is barely distinguishable from exploitations like VH1's Breaking Bonaduce.) But in the main, the program hasn't compromised its inquisitive, sensitive soul. It's a little like the old man glimpsed in Episode Five, who sits in his wife's mausoleum three days every week. "I've got my own ways of doing things," he says. "If I want to do something, nobody can talk me out of it." The same goes for This American Life. Now there's a good story.