Ira Glass expands 'Life' experience

March 18, 2007
BY DOUG ELFMAN
Chicago Sun-Times
Very few people have complained about how they were portrayed in the radio show "This American Life," host Ira Glass says. But now that Glass is fronting a TV version of "This American Life" on Showtime, he's worried about how some very specific, fellow Chicagoans will view a certain upcoming segment.
He's anxious about a story in the sixth episode, regarding the Wiener's Circle hot dog stand on North Clark.
"The customers and the people of the staff yell at each other," Glass says. "When I say that, you picture a kind of, like, cutesy ... sitcom.
"But in fact, it was so profoundly ugly," he says. "You feel like 200 years of, like, racial division in the city of Chicago have totally come to the surface. It's white customers and a black staff, and it gets incredibly intense and incredibly racial.
"I love those guys, and I love that place, and I feel like I appreciate what they're doing," he says. But "I'm a little scared about the hot dog guys' [reaction]."
Glass -- who launched "This American Life" in 1995 at Chicago's WBEZ-FM (91.5) and co-owns it with the station -- rejected earlier offers to turn his public radio show into a TV series.
"We said to Showtime what we had said to everybody else, which was, like, 'We know nothing about making moving images. And we won't do it unless you find filmmakers who can explain to us how this will happen, and what it would look like, and what it would be. And they have to be filmmakers who we respect.' "
But then, Showtime came back with an offer involving producer Christine Vachon, someone Glass knew in college, and respected.
"They called our bluff," he says.
PBS never approached Glass. And he never considered going with PBS
"Public television is terrible," Glass, 48, says. "It's just not that interesting most of time. There are a couple [great] shows. I love 'Frontline.' "
He considers public TV a good idea with not enough money to operate quickly and smoothly, and it's more "beholden to corporate interest than commercial TV."
"A network like Showtime -- they say, 'Come on. We're going. We're going.' And then they can write the check, and basically we're in production."
Glass did expect Showtime -- the network of nudity, as well as high-quality programming -- to ask him to sex up "This American Life."
"We kept waiting for the memo where they would say ... 'Yeah, yeah, this is good. When do the girls take off their tops?'
"And, you know, that never happened."