‘This American Life’ translates well to TV

REVIEW

By Frazier Moore

Television writer

updated 1:02 p.m. ET March 20, 2007

NEW YORK - What happens when Ira Glass and his team at public radio's "This American Life" presume to bring the much-adored, long-running series to television?

They pull it off!

Somehow this gang has managed to replicate on TV screens what, for 1.7 million listeners weekly, flows from the radio smartly unencumbered by pictures. (Vivid pictures, of course, bloom in each listener's mind.)

What a relief for leery listeners! But maybe they're still wondering: Why put "This American Life" on TV anyway?

"We just thought it would be fun to do something new," says Glass, who, since creating the show in 1995, has furnished its signature vision and voice. "I wish the reason was more high-minded than that."

Not that Glass rushed headlong into TV's embrace. He was pitched ages ago, he says, by broadcast networks who liked the show — but strongly suggested that its TV incarnation should dwell on subjects drawn from the younger demographic.

So when Showtime came calling, Glass was in no hurry. He wondered what the catch would be.

"We kept asking them, ‘Well, is there anything we need to know?' and they basically said, ‘Make it special.'"

People telling stories about themselves
Like on radio, Showtime's "This American Life" (premiering 10:30 p.m. EDT Thursday) tells stories about people who tell stories about themselves. However much these stories may vary, there is always drama, waves of discovery and, always, a surprise — or even a flat-out revelation.

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Beyond that, as with its radio counterpart, "This American Life" on TV defies summarizing. To try to boil down one of its stories into just a few words is to boil it away. Even so, here goes:

Hewing to a chosen theme (as the radio version does), the premiere episode is titled "Reality Check," and begins with a brief piece about a little girl on a school bus who makes a charmingly tragic error in judgment.

After that come two longer stories, dubbed "acts." A beloved family pet — a Brahman bull, of all things — dies, then is resurrected by the owner and his wife, with unfortunate results. And finally, good intentions go awry when a band of merry pranksters in New York pretends to idolize an obscure rock duo.

Future half-hours (there are six) include a story about senior citizens who write and star in their first short film, with nothing less as their goal than getting it accepted by the Sundance Film Festival. Another story somehow intertwines an artist who paints biblical portraits, the model he enlists as Jesus, the model's atheist girlfriend and her strict Mormon father in a spirited clash of personalities and creeds.

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