People have been insisting that "This American Life" is creating a new type of television genre with its recent jump from radio to Showtime. It is not, they insist, a documentary show. They are lying. It's a documentary, and it's great.
Based on Ira Glass' very popular NPR radio program, the show strings together a few people's interesting stories according to loose themes. The first episode, for example, is about the difference between one's fantasy of an event and the reality of the event. It includes a story about a girl who peed on her school bus and expected not to get caught, a farmer who cloned his favorite bull and expected the clone to be the same as the original, and a band that thought they had a huge New York following but discovered that it was just an Improv Everywhere prank.
The reason that people want to distance this show from documentary shows is that most documentary-style shows are really bad. Think "E! True Hollywood Stories." What makes "This American Life" different from most documentary shows is that the story is almost entirely controlled by its subject and its narrator. People submit their stories to Ira Glass, and their stories are respectfully reported through Ira Glass' interviews, first person accounts and reenactments.
Many people were very wary about this show making a medium transformation, since so much of television seems like exactly the sort of populist and pandering medium that NPR is always trying to combat. But the stories on "This American Life" are much better suited for public consumption than, for example, the ones on "All Things Considered." The point of these stories is not to point out some weirdos or to shake our fingers at the sinners and marvel at the saints.
They are just people, nothing extremely surprising about them, except that they happen to have unique and special experiences. In some ways, this universalizes the show; it gives us a chance to wonder what our lives would have been like had we been in their situations.
It is also consistently surprising that the show has never run out of stories. We, as Americans, tend to have extraordinary experiences every now and then, but it's not just the experiences alone that carry the show. By itself, a story about a girl peeing on the bus is not fascinating, but the insight she provides into the workings of her mind gives us all a reference point into the story. It's no longer just a story about peeing on a bus. The thematic groupings show us that these stories, while specific to the people who are telling them, also contain universal experience within them. How many of us have had a fantasy cruelly shattered by reality?
Ira Glass himself also appears on the show, introducing the stories from his desk, placed in improbable locations (at a crossroads, for example). Seeing him, you'd think that he has a face made for radio. Hearing him, you'd think he has a voice made for mime. In translation to television, there is suddenly a huge pressure to look and sound good, neither of which Ira Glass does. But he is the creative force behind the show, and an extremely talented one at that. His appearance on the show marks a sort of television meritocracy - he deserves to be on television more than does, say, Brian Dunkelman.
Showtime is, of course, the perfect place for this show. It's like premium cable's FX. Showtime is completely willing to take risks with its television. By all standards, "This American Life" was a huge risk. And it has completely paid off.
