Bloggasm

Although I’m a big fan of This American Life’s public radio version, I’ve only seen the first episode of its television spin-off, mostly because I don’t have Showtime. I enjoyed that first episode, and I’ve been entertained by the few clips from other ones which have made their way online.

I was surprised, then, that Nancy Franklin at The New Yorker didn’t like it:

Still, the camera can take you only so far; you need good sense and soul to get you the rest of the way, and Glass, in this new medium, has more to learn. The series, incredibly, begins with a short reminiscence by a woman who, as an eight-year-old, peed while riding the school bus, because she just couldn’t hold it anymore. The nut of the story is that she thought she’d figured out how to position herself so that no one would notice what she was doing. What she hadn’t counted on was that the stream would move once it was on the floor, and that everyone would know, and that it would be a source of humiliation for years to come. This anecdote would have been just as vivid on the radio, where we would have been spared the image of urine running along the floor. Seeing it called to mind a recent episode of the CW reality show “Pussycat Dolls Present: The Search for the Next Doll,” in which a group of young women trying out for the pop group catch a virus and some of them are shown vomiting—vomit included. In this age of transparency, one sometimes wishes for a little opacity.

The writer specifically takes Glass to task for his characteristic broadcast voice, what I’d consider one of his best and most unique attributes.

***

Related posts: The Naked Trucker and T-Bones Show: Possibly the worst comedy on television