The Face Behind the Voice of Ira Glass

There's something compelling about everyday people. Ira Glass would like to have you think so, at least.

For fifteen years, Glass has hosted and produced This American Life, the award-winning show on National Public Radio that explores the surprisingly unusual lives of ordinary people in a conversational style that seems almost outdated in an age that is so television-dominated. But This American Life is to become a television show, too. It remains to be seen whether the almost two million faithful listeners the show boasts will follow the program to Showtime, where it premieres today.

Ira Glass is about to become more than just a voice. His voice, however, has guided the radio show from its roots in Chicago to the success it now boasts. Glass is a natural storyteller, the kind you don't hear anymore. He has impressive contributors who tell their stories, too, like David Sedaris, Davy Rothbart, the creator of Found Magazine, and Sarah Vowell, the author of, most recently, Assassination Vacation. And the stories Glass and his guests tell are gripping, often surprisingly so.

One of the best episodes, produced in 2002, is the story of inmates in a high-security prison performing the fifth and final act of Hamlet. Having conclusively made the decision to kill that Hamlet gripes over, these men have an insight into the story missing in other interpretations.

Most often, the show is divided into three or four "acts," each featuring a different take on a uniting theme. For instance, "In the Shadow of the City," originally produced in February 2006, tells "stories that take place on the edge of civilization, just out of sight." It includes the tale of a vivacious young immigrant who, with his friends, gets shipwrecked while still within view of Manhattan.

The characters presented-real, genuine, living characters-along with Glass' impeccable transitions and the ever-appropriate music (Mates of State recently went on tour with the show) drive the radio version of This American Life and make junkies out of the listeners.

What happens when you put faces in front of all these anonymous, empathetic voices? Glass wants to make the show "like nothing else on television," he said in a recent interview. Judging from his precedent, he won't have all that much trouble. He has already created something that is unlike anything in any media, really. It's a sort of documentary, but real, probing journalism about people.

Glass said, "The people in our stories are having their regular lives, and the stakes in the stories are the things closest to their hearts, which usually means much bigger stakes than on any reality show."

Still, he concedes that some subjects are better suited for radio than television. And some cannot be put on television at all: some people only agree to tell their stories anonymously. Still, there are ways to portray stories; in one clip of the television show, animation is used to illustrate a story which is particularly relevant to this television-making endeavor. "Jeff" tells how cardboard video cameras became a trend on the playground when he was in fifth grade, and how holding these cameras changed the behavior of the children. Ira Glass comments in that episode, "People act different if they're behind a camera-even if the camera isn't real." Will the makers the This American Life themselves act differently now that they have cameras supplementing their microphones? It seems improbable.

Even the radio version of This American Life has an undeniably artistic aura, and so it is hard to doubt that the television version will be anything but beautiful. Glass said in an interview, "We wanted the images to be as ambitiously made as everything else in the stories." While limiting the possible subjects, adding a visual element broadens the overall scope of the show, and now This American Life will be able to show, not just tell.

Impressive though the radio version is, I'm sure most listeners have wondered just what expression someone had on their face when speaking, or even just what these "ordinary people" look like. Aided by talented cinematographers, Showtime's version of the show will equal, and might even trump, NPR's. But Glass made it clear on a recent radio episode that it is not a competition. He said, "Radio is so different from television, you know. And as we were making our television show, people kept asking me, 'Which is better?' People ask me this all the time now, 'So which is it going to be, radio or TV, which is better?' Like we're all going to have to choose sides, between radio and TV because there's going to be a big war, you know... when in fact there actually was a war, and radio kind of lost that war. And the fact is, radio and TV, they're good for different things. Radio is so intimate, and TV can be so weirdly grand in what it does."

The adjective grand certainly doesn't apply to everything on TV, but This American Life, more than anything else, has the potential to be grand, a potential created by the improbably interesting lives of Americans like you and me.