Ira Glass
And so there is this climate where people are just trying different stuff. And as a result, in any given week there are probably at least two great shows on the air. And then another bunch of shows that are just kind of interesting. So you’ve got The Daily Show, and The Office, and Friday Night Lights, and South Park, and Intervention, and Project Runway and 30 Rock– just a lot of interesting stuff out there.
Though of course, not everybody feels that TV is so great. When the television version of our radio show first premiered in 2007, we took our show on a six-city tour- to Boston, New York, Minneapolis, Chicago, Seattle, and Los Angeles. And when I would mention to the crowd that we, ourselves, had just finished shooting a television show, it sometimes got a little chilly. In Minneapolis, a guy actually yelled, “Judas.”
There are a lot of people who think that television is terrible, that it’s bad for kids, it’s bad for American politics, it’s the cause of all kinds of problems in this country. And so, with this disagreement all around us, we decided to tackle the subject head on. Television is at the center of our culture. It’s hard to avoid. What does it do to us anyway?
Well, from WBEZ Chicago it’s This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I’m Ira Glass. Our show today- on this weekend when we begin the second season of our television show- What We Learned from Television. Our show was recorded in front of live audiences on the six-city tour in 2007. Our show in four acts- Act One, 29. David Rackoff- like a wild child raised in the woods, a foreigner to our people- tries TV for the first time since he was a child. Act Two, Turkeys in Pilgrim Clothing, Sarah Vowell examines what happens when TV takes on a project it really has no business taking on at all. Act Three, Radio on the TV. In that act, a few words about what I’ve personally learned about television during the first year in which I worked on a television show myself. Act Four, My Other Dog’s a German Shepherd. In that act, Dan Savage- a syndicated sex-columnist and podcaster who is not put off by dirty content- finds something so filthy, so weird, and perverted on television that he doesn’t want his son to watch it. And it’s a kid’s show made for children. On our six-city tour, we were lucky enough to travel with a band that we love, the Mates of State- Kori Gardner and Jason Hammel. So you’ll be hearing from them too. Stay with us.
