Radio on the TV

Ira Glass is a busy man. After 11 years of making This American Life for Chicago Public Radio, his program is now a Showtime television series. In addition to this demanding new responsibility, he and his crew are still keeping up with producing the show’s radio version. “I’ve had a great year,” says Glass, “you know, this incredible year—I have my own TV show. [But it’s also been] a really horrible year; I barely saw my wife and family. It’s been a mix.”

Amidst all the craziness, Glass still took some time out to chat with Paste about all the changes he and his endearing show have seen this past year, since he decided to make the brave leap from the airwaves to the small-screen.

PASTE: So, how are you holding up these days?
GLASS: I’m just fine. Every day this week I’ve gotten up at four in the morning to catch a plane to go to the next city on our tour, but I have to say, that’s been surprisingly OK.

P: Tell us about the new TV version of This American Life—in an NPR article, you said that you declined TV offers for a year and half, and that you also didn’t seem too pleased seeing yourself on TV. Are you enjoying the new format? How is it different than doing radio?
G: Unless you’re used to being on camera, it’s really weird. When you’re interviewing somebody on the radio, either you’re talking to each other from soundproof studios on opposite sides of the country, which can be incredibly intimate—just hearing each other in the headphones and talking into these really nice microphones. Or just as often you’ll be sitting across the table and talking to them or sitting at their kitchen table with a little tape recorder, so there’s a very intimate kind of space, and when it ends up on the air, it feels very intimate. For TV, even when the interviews are about pretty personal stuff, the person’s sitting there and you’ve got to move eight or 10 feet back, and then there’s the camera eight or 10 feet back from the person, and then the person doing the interview is behind them, so I’m like 14 or 15 feet away. You’re so far, which makes it harder to have a chatty conversation.

P: Transforming the show to TV, did you feel like you were giving too much control over to other people, because This American Life has always seemed like your show, since you’re pretty much in charge of all the content.
G: I am in charge, but it’s still a collaboration. I’m like the editor-in-chief. I don’t make every edit, but I have final say on everything, and with the TV show it’s the same. Obviously, there are a lot of things I don’t know how to do, and it’s good that other people are in charge of them. Though that’s hard. One of the things about radio is—I mean, I was a good person to start the show because I know every single thing there is to know about this kind of radio production. I’m as experienced or more experienced than anybody doing it, so I can speak with authority about a variety of production questions, whereas on the TV I really can’t.

P: I guess that’s where cinematographer Adam Beckman and director Chris Wilcha come in. Have you been comfortable working with them?
G: Frankly, at the beginning, there was a bit of tension between the TV people and radio people, even though I’ve known Adam for years and he’s married to one of our old producers and even did one of the most popular radio stories we’ve ever done on the show, “House on Loon Lake.” So I’ve known [Adam and Chris] for years, and I like them and trust them, but there was a tension, I think, at the beginning between the radio people—who always wanted more reporting, more interviewing, more time to talk to people—and the TV people, who very much felt like “let’s go out and shoot more pictures, let’s get more images.”

P: It’s a bit of a surprise that This American Life was picked up by Showtime. It seems more like a PBS type thing.
G: Showtime called us over and over again over the course of a year, and was very insistent, and then, when we said “yes,” they could just write a check, versus PBS, who if they had said yes, then it takes them two years to raise the money. It’s hard. Public broadcasting is hard. [But] the fact is that I don’t think we could’ve done better. Showtime gave us complete freedom. We didn’t fight with them about stuff. They didn’t ask us to do stuff at all. They would look at our lists of story ideas and sometimes they would voice concerns about it, and then we would explain why we thought it’d be interesting, and they would always just kind of go, “OK, you guys know what you’re doing.” And so there weren’t even conflicts.

Read the sidebar to this story, The Look of Life, here.