'This American Life' TV show on hiatus despite Emmy win
Ira Glass announced 'This American Life' TV show on hiatus despite recent Emmy win for one of its second season episodes.
Use the player above to listen to interview with Ira from Justin Kaufmann and WBEZ.
Today Ira Glass told Justin Kaufmann, editor of the WBEZ Blog, that the "This American Life" TV show is on hiatus.
"Basically, the deal is that it's just a tremendous amount of work doing the radio show and the TV show," said Glass.
He added that Showtime was very accommodating but that, it was, "just very grueling to do both shows."
The TV show is currently in its second season on the cable network, Showtime.
The "This American Life" radio show premiered in Chicago on WBEZ on November 17, 1995, and went into full national distribution on Public Radio International in June of 1996. The weekly broadcast can be heard on 575 PRI stations, with an estimated weekly audience of over 1.8 million. The radio show has collected numerous awards, including a Peabody, a duPont-Columbia and most recently, a Murrow in July of this year.
The second season of the "This American Life" TV series recently garnered an Outstanding Editing for Nonfiction Programming Emmy for Joe Beshenkovsky for his work on the episode, "John Smith."
Glass says he hopes to still work with Showtime on periodic specials if and when the conditions are right.
He admits he never got completely comfortable working on the TV side.
"When you're doing a radio show, you can do journalism in a very traditional way -- most of the reporting is from things that have already happened ... for TV, you want to be there as the thing happens, as it unfolds, and so you don't want this past-tense kind of thing.
"And when you're looking for a story, what you want is a story with incredible stakes and something new to say, but it hasn't happened yet. And so that's a really weird kind of reporting to do -- to look for something that hasn't occurred but will occur, about to occur."
Glass and his staff had moved to New York in order to work on the TV show, but now that it's ending, Glass says he has no immediate plans to move back to Chicago.
Produced by Chicago Public Radio, "This American Life" is PRI's multiple award-winning, critically acclaimed program that describes and documents contemporary American life. More "This American Life."
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