Storytelling: What Radio Does Best

DCist covers a lecture by Ira Glass, host of National Public Radio's This American Life. Glass tells his audience, as he has many times before, that storytelling is what radio does best, and that it’s hardly ever used for that purpose.

Which I find ironic now that This American Life is starting its SECOND season as a television show. (Storytelling may not be what television does best, but it's almost always used for that purpose).
(Has anyone seen the show? I haven't looked at the DVD of Season One yet.)

And coming up May 1 a live version of TAL will be broadcast via a digital satellite video feed (everywhere except the West Coast). Only this live event will show clips from the upcoming TV season. Wait. What?

Fans will go to movie theatres to watch a live feed of a radio host showing clips from a TV show? WTF?

DCist article: "Empathy is What Makes Us Sane."

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With all my complaints about personal memoir dominating the storytelling scene, you'd think I'd be down on TAL. Funnily enough, while I do have complaints about the show, it's not their choice of genre. It's their style and tone I that mars the compelling storytelling (i.e. their need to explain the moral of every story and their overreliance on the personal memoirs of their own production team (Blumberg, Glass, Hitt, Goldstein, Updike, Vowell, etc. --all very talented writers and editors, but frankly, when it comes to determining how interesting their own lives are, they're not by any means impartial).

Snarky but dead-on coverage by The Onion, from a year ago: "This American Life Completes Documentation Of Liberal, Upper-Middle-Class Existence"