Eye-Opening Radio: 'This American Life' Moves to Television

So there had to be a director, Christopher Wilcha, whose background was in promos and short films for MTV, PBS and TV Land, and a cinematographer, Adam Beckman. Together, they created a look that draws from Errol Morris, Frederick Wiseman and other great documentarians of the 1970s and '80s, along with a bit of Monty Python.

The TV version is designed to let characters reveal themselves as they do on the radio, by talking, at length. To make that palatable and even riveting on TV, the director called for pictures that are more formal than most TV, using wide shots, very pretty landscapes and a staged, posed aesthetic.

That sensibility is evident from the top of the show, when Glass, 48, appears sitting at an old-fashioned anchor desk that has been trucked to the location of the story. There's the anti-anchor, dressed in a suit, sitting at a desk in the middle of a cow pasture or in the Utah salt beds.

"None of us had seen the Monty Python," Glass says, referring to a famous comedy bit in which John Cleese, spoofing overly formal BBC announcers, appeared as a news anchor seated behind a desk that was being trucked along a busy motorway, or on a residential street. "We were very, very profoundly disappointed to learn that they had already done it."

The disembodied desk was a compromise, a way to settle an argument between the radio people, who wanted Glass to remain unseen, and the TV people, who thought it just batty to have an anchor with no face.

Showtime is happy enough with the first batch of programs that a second season is in the offing. That means fans of the radio program might have to sit through more reruns; to carve out time to make the TV show, Glass and company cut the number of radio hours they produced from 30 to about 18 last year.

There are still many stories Glass says just won't work on TV, such as one about Congress that he abandoned as a TV project because he couldn't get access for the cameras to reach places where members of Congress were letting down their hair, while the same subject felt personal and revelatory on the radio.

"Television cannot beat the intimacy of radio, like a chatty person coming on and just telling a story," Glass says. "But I was naive. I had thought of the pictures on TV as illustration, like the music on the radio. But in one shot, you can totally see a character just through his face."

Still, Glass wouldn't for a moment consider dropping radio.

"Radio is just an easier form of self-expression for me," he says. "I like editing myself. I like writing for radio. To do just TV would be like giving up a job I'm good at for one that I'm okay at."

This American Life will air Thursday nights at 10:30 on Showtime, following its March 19 premiere.