INTERVIEW. Like a dogged “On Your Side” nightly news reporter, Ira Glass is dedicated to telling your story (though he is much less grating and exceptionally more entertaining). The host of the fascinating Public Radio show “This American Life” crafts stranÂger-than-fiction real-life tales of the nationÂ’s public, some of which are set to air on ThursdayÂ’s premiere of the “TAL” television adaptation on Showtime.
Television and radio are obviously very different media. How do you take such a beloved radio program and make it work for TV?
Part of the power of radio comes from the invisibility. ThereÂ’s just something more powerful about hearing somebody talk in that radio darkness. And we have to give that up. The show is based on people coming in and just quietly telling these amazing stories. Really quickly, we got into the question of what in the world do you show when they tell those stories? There are tradiÂtional ways that you can do that. You find old photos, and you do the Ken Burns things where the camera pans across the photo, but that has totally been done. We were going to have to invent someÂthing new.
How did you figure it out? Previewing the first couple of episodes, it seems you’ve already created a signature “look” for the show.
WeÂ’ve tried to be really ambitious with the way itÂ’s shot and what it looks like and tried to invent someÂthing that looks different than anything else on television. And, I mean, truthfully, to turn the radio show into a television show, we could have just put people into a studio and filmed them telling their stories. But it felt like that wasnÂ’t ambitious enough. It felt like that wouldnÂ’t be exploiting everything you can do with pictures to the degree we wanted. We wanted the pictures to be part of telling the story, so we committed to a more documentary kind of look.
Are there any established TV journalists youÂ’re taking cues from?
I love “The Daily Show” so much that I turn to it as an actual news source. I feel like there is someÂthing in the tone of that show where [Jon Stewart is] talking in a normal voice and in the normal way that people talk about the news that you just donÂ’t get on the actual news. And I keep telling my friends who actually are in network news, “Why donÂ’t you do a show thatÂ’s actually the real news, but just talk normal like the guy on ‘The Daily ShowÂ’?” ThatÂ’s something I couldnÂ’t have more admiration for.
'Postcard' production
In the televised episodes of “This American Life,” Glass appears with a BBC-style hefty wooden desk in the most unusual locales. Director/co-executive producer Christopher Wilcha explains why:
“We didnÂ’t want to shoot [Glass] in a studio, and we didnÂ’t want to shoot him walking through gardens in some sort of Stone Phillips-y kind of way. So we had this epiphany one day: What does every TV host have? A desk. But what if the backÂdrop, the sort of void that appears behind them, is not a studio but, in fact, an American landscape of some kind? It would have a certain sort of slightness to real quality but would also be like a piece of photography.”
So, they dragged Glass around in a desk to locations such as the mountains of Colorado, the salt flats in Utah and nuclear cooling towers in Pennsylvania.