Ira Glass is taking his quirky radio hit to TV

It makes total sense that Showtime would be the TV network that would spend five years cajoling the creator of This American Life to make a video version of radio’s most original and unpredictable program.

After all, This American Life, with its leisurely story-telling and decidedly anti-establishment point of view, could never have found its way to commercial radio. And Showtime doesn’t air commercials.

For those who aren’t part of its listening audience, This American Life has been on the air since 1995. Each weekly show has a loose theme but content (current events, life on the island nation of Nauru), and mood, varies widely.

But what about taking the show to public TV? Don’t even suggest that option to This American Life host and creator Ira Glass.

“Public television is terrible,” Glass said, breaking up a roomful of TV critics in January. “I work for a public radio station, and many of the stations which carry our show are affiliated with public TV stations. So this isn’t the greatest thing for me to say, but it’s the truth. In terms of innovation and what they do, you know, it’s just not that interesting most of the time.”

Sad to say, Glass is right. Besides, PBS didn’t come to him, Showtime did, and courted him for years before the famously nerdy host of the Chicago-based radio program said OK.

When Glass demanded that the look and feel of This American Life on TV be worked out before agreeing to do the deal, Showtime said fine. When Glass wanted to work with a filmmaker, Showtime hooked him up with Killer Films, best known for Boys Don’t Cry.

Showtime’s perseverance was amply rewarded. This American Life on TV is a one-of-a-kind show for a one-of-a-kind storyteller, with a presence ideally suited to the radio program’s off-the-front-pages subject matter and its off-the-beaten-path host and his many correspondents.

Don’t expect to see too much of the literary stars minted by the radio show, like Sarah Vowell and David Sedaris. But do expect to see more subjects such as the rancher who loved his prize steer so much, he had him cloned. Or the 14-year-old named Joe who took a solemn vow that he will never fall in love with anyone—ever.

This American Life fans on radio may have a sense of deja vu watching the pilot episode, which airs Thursday on Showtime. That’s because—for the pilot episode only—the stories originally aired on radio, like the one called “Pee Girl,” featuring a woman who reveals how her life changed one day in school when she was on the bus and just had to go.

“When we did the stories for the pilot, we had no idea if Showtime was going to pick us up,” Glass said. “In fact, we figured they will never pick us up.”

You can’t blame Glass for being pessimistic about TV. With his Buddy Holly glasses and business suit, not to mention that voice, he just doesn’t seem like the kind of guy any network would want in front of a camera. But his audience adores him: 1.7 million Americans every week tune in “This American Life” on their local public radio station, and thousands more download it every week, making it one of iTunes’ most popular podcasts.

The vast majority of listeners are young and affluent, not unlike Howard Stern’s audience, and could add substantial numbers to Showtime’s subscription rolls, which still lag behind HBO and Cinemax.

Speaking of the King of All Media, Glass loves the Stern show on radio but takes a cautionary lesson from the difficulties Stern has had translating his act to television.

That is why it took five years to develop This American Life with Showtime. Glass didn’t know what he wanted, but he knew what he didn’t want. In an early version of the program, cameramen tried shooting stories with hand-held camcorders. The video looked awful, so they threw it out.

“Truthfully, to turn the radio show into a television show, we could have just put people into a studio and filmed them telling their stories,” Glass said. “But it felt like that wasn’t ambitious enough. It felt like that wouldn’t be exploiting everything you can do with pictures to the degree we wanted. We wanted the pictures to be part of telling the story.”

So they put the camera on a tripod and went for a more intentional, documentary-style look. It worked. This American Life on TV achieves the same contemplative mood as the radio show. And it has a striking spareness of imagery, much as “Life” on radio has a spareness of sound. That will become more obvious next week, because from the second episode onward, Glass and company chose stories exclusively for the TV audience, such as the one about the Chicago hot dog stand where drunken white patrons and hostile black servers yell obscenities at one another—for sport. It’s Showtime, so no bleep button is required.

“Finding stuff for TV turned out to be one of the biggest challenges,” Glass said. “If anything, we’ve totally been appreciating just how easy it is to make radio. It never seemed easy to us before.”