For more than a decade, WBEZ's This American
Life has
been a welcome guest in its listeners' lives. Every week, host Ira Glass shares
a series of stories grouped around a common theme, but the show is defined as
much by his literal and authorial voice—wry, empathetic, often bemused,
and radiating boundless curiosity about humanity and its infinite quirks—as
its format. The public-radio institution's long-threatened television
adaptation engendered excitement and concern from fans. Would the show's tricky
tone translate to television? Would it make the trip to the glass teat with its
warmth and intimacy intact? How could slick visuals possibly compete with the
mental pictures radio listeners concocted to accompany each evocative story?
Like its radio sibling, TV's This American Life explores
colorful stories that travel in unexpected directions, like the tale of a
patriarch who retains faith in the fundamental goodness of a clone of his
beloved pet bull, even after the genetically engineered beast attacks him
twice. The result plays like Pet Sematary by way of The New Yorker. Standout segments have the
compact, insinuating power of a great short story, or raise disquieting
questions about human nature, like a story about a Chicago hot-dog stand where
foul-mouthed, jokingly abusive give-and-take between wealthy white customers
and the black, working-class staff sometimes takes an ugly, racist turn.
The stakes are high for Showtime's Life. The good news is that the
show—whose first season has just been released on DVD everywhere, after
months of being available only at Borders, in a deal sure to enrage armchair
Marxists—has made the scary leap to television with much of its charm and
integrity intact. It helps that the first season runs a scant, British-style
six episodes, which doesn't afford it much opportunity to wear out its welcome.
Ira Glass hosts each episode from a traveling desk that pops up in unexpected
locations, a conceit that skirts preciousness without crossing over. In a weird
way, the pet-bull story echoes Life's migration to pay cable, but it's less a clone
gone awry than a whole new entity that borrows from the visual vocabulary of
documentaries, music videos, and independent film, while preserving the radio
hit's poignant, searching, deeply humane core.
Key features: An amusing, candid
commentary from Glass and director Christopher Wilcha on the first episode.