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Jonathan Storm | 'This American Life,' with pictures

If you've been listening to This American Life on public radio all these years, seeing Ira Glass on his new TV version of the show, Thursdays at 10:30 p.m. on Showtime, should be no surprise.

If you've been listening to

This American Life

on public radio all these years, seeing Ira Glass on his new TV version of the show, Thursdays at 10:30 p.m. on Showtime, should be no surprise.

There he is, straight out of Dweeb Central, skinny with a functional haircut and huge glasses with thick, black rims. He sports a cheap black suit, white shirt and dark tie.

Each week, the show takes him and a big wooden desk with a mug on top, like every TV host has, and plops them in exotic outdoor settings - Colorado mountains, Utah salt flats, in the shadow of Pennsylvania power plant cooling towers.

The message is that while this show is headed by a fellow with a point-of-view, it's also like nothing you've seen before.

Glass teams with producer Christine Vachon (Boys Don't Cry, Mrs. Harris, Infamous - he calls her "the queen of independent movie-making"); director Christopher Wilcha, who has done documentaries everywhere from MTV to PBS, and reality TV veterans Banks Tarver and Ken Druckerman (Growing Up Gotti, I Pity the Fool).

Fear not, Mr. T haters. What emerges is first-rate shape-shifting from radio to TV, "not quite documentary, not much of a news magazine and definitely not a reality show," as the Showtime promo material, which sounds as if Glass himself wrote it, puts it.

Its staple is still people stories, but there's more present tense than on the radio. Most shots look like photographs, with striking lighting or composition or color contrast, and they make a show that is not just illustrated radio.

Tonight's theme, "Growth Spurt," features short visits with a comedian who made jokes about her husband's death on 9/11, and a young woman who reads from the diary she kept as a 13-year-old. She was bored in Miami Beach private school, so she persuaded her parents to send her to public. Not much later, she was in rehab.

But the bulk of the show features elderly people from the Burbank (Calif.) Senior Arts Colony, who make a short movie that they hope to submit to the Sundance Film Festival. The stars are an octogenarian with a walker and a guy who can barely speak English.

The screenwriter, 63, who always wanted to write but never did, is so-o-o excited to be moving into a new phase in her life.

"When was the last time you felt this excitement?" Glass, who appears on camera only at the start and end of the show, asks.

"I've never felt it," she replies.

"Why isn't the show on PBS?" somebody asked Glass in January at the semi-annual Television Critics Association gathering in California.

"I feel like public television is terrible," he replied. "In terms of innovation and what they do, you know, it's just not that interesting most of the time." That's mainly, he said, because it doesn't have enough cash. He referred to a study that found that "the stations are more beholden to corporate interests than commercial TV."

This American Life fans know that many of the narrators, and Glass himself, sound, well, a little strange on the radio.

I asked him if people had to have speech impediments to get on the show.

"I think that when you listen to somebody on the radio, it pierces through to your heart most effectively if they sound like they are actually talking," he said.

"And so on our show, we try to have people who talk exactly the way they talk, and, sadly for us, we come from a generation of mumblers."

The clarity of the TV show's visuals makes a great contrast to that mumbly tradition. Radio's "theater of the mind" may trump the literalness of TV, but the images help make This American Life even more satisfyingly intimate on Showtime than it is on the radio.

It's an even trade.

Jonathan Storm |

Television

This American Life

10:30 tonight on Showtime