"This American Life" gets a great review

I love this radio show. I'm excited to see it as a TV show.

Inner Tube
Radio Head
by Sacha Zimmerman
Only at TNR Online | Post date 03.22.07


For the past ten years, "This American Life" has been must-listen radio among the NPR set. I myself have tuned in on many a Saturday afternoon to hear smart, well-told stories about everyday epiphanies and about the peculiar folks who comprise our great country.

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In slow, deliberate fashion, "This American Life" reveals the stories we all tell each other but that seldom make news apart from our own social circles. There was the episode about lying in which a young man goes to great lengths all through college to maintain the pretense of being from a strict vegetarian family; the episode on testosterone in which a transgendered man misses having a good cry; and the episode where a man's daughter recognizes similarities between Jesus and Martin Luther King Jr., and asks her father of King, "Did they kill him, too?"

In other words, it's fascinating, internal stuff; it's like hearing a great secret or being seated next to someone intriguing at a dinner party. And, because "This American Life" does unfold like a pleasurable conversation, it's hard to imagine it would be any good at all on television. Where radio is languid, television assaults the senses. Where radio is background, television demands our full attention.

But tonight, "This American Life" will premiere on Showtime, complete with Ira Glass (who, it turns out, is bespectacled and kind of groovy) and the mournful music that punctuates even the most comical pieces on the radio. And the show is really good.

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http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w070319&s=zimmerman032207

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid271557392?bctid=666401814

And I'm officially suggesting that NPR animate *all* of their stories from now on. I want to see Nina Totenberg as a round-headed lady with a tiny body in front of the Supreme Court.

It's so clear from Ira's voice that he just gets such a kick out of life and sees irony and humor in everything. Don't think video will kill that radio star.

Good for him.

because your image of them in your head never matches their actual look.
Case in point, here's Ira in all his groovy, bespectacled glory

I too love the radio show, and the TV show is more of the same, maybe better.