Just because the television version of “This American Life” is running on Showtime and not PBS doesn’t mean the show’s bespectacled, speech-impeded host will be replaced by a well-spoken leggy supermodel. “We kept waiting for the memo where they would say, ‘Yeah, yeah, this is good. When do the girls take off their tops?’” host Ira Glass joked about his show’s adaptation from radio to television (it premieres March 22nd at 10:30 p.m. on Showtime). But PBS never approached him about developing the show for the small screen, which may have been for the best. “I feel like public television is terrible. I mean I work for a public radio station, and many of the stations which carry our show are affiliated with public TV, but it’s the truth. The stations are more beholden to corporate interest than commercial TV.”

The television version of Glass’s Peabody Award-winning radio show, which was created at WBEZ in Chicago and which reaches 1.7 million listeners weekly, will focus on the same kind of homespun stories the radio version has focused on since its creation in 1995: warm-hearted tales of real people centered around a single theme. One of the first episodes, titled “The Cameraman,” reveals the truth about a son’s flawed family through the documentary footage he shot of them. And the show’s pilot episode explores how people are snapped back into reality by something unexpected – in one segment, a rock band experiences their best gig ever, until the truth is revealed. In another, a cloned bull proves he is not the same animal as his DNA-related brethren.

Because the radio program has such a unique sound and style, the Showtime version took a long time to develop. What Glass didn’t want to do was simply put the radio show on television. “I love Howard Stern,” he said. “But on TV, it’s never so great.” And while it was hard to find the kind of stories that would work well on television, establishing the show’s visual style was even more difficult. Thankfully, director and executive producer Chris Wilcha was able to experiment with a variety of different techniques. “We didn’t want to shoot him walking through gardens in some sort of Stone Phillips-y kind of way,” he said of the style that eventually emerged. “We wanted to shoot with one camera as opposed to 10. We sort of stayed back often and shot things from far away, and I think it allowed for a certain kind of intimacy.” And that intimacy comes across on screen. The show’s visuals are more like an Errol Morris documentary than a cable TV reality show.

Glass will remain the narrator in the TV version, and will anchor the show from behind a traditional talk show desk but from a number of non-traditional settings. “To make this collection of postcard images,” Wilcha said, “We dragged Ira around to mountains in Colorado, salt flats in Utah, and nuclear cooling towers in Pennsylvania. It sort of unburdened us of a lot of TV clichés.”

Glass’ voice is also non-traditional, which is part of the show’s charm. “When you listen to somebody on the radio, it pierces through to your heart most effectively if they sound like are actually talking. I’m just a whiny Jew,” Glass said of the way he sounds on-air. “I have an utterly average voice. It’s just sheer repetition that makes it sound like it belongs on the radio.”

Aside from Glass, the show will feature contributions from other “This American Life” regulars. Neither Sarah Vowell nor David Sedaris participated in the show’s first season, though Glass said they will likely appear in future episodes of the series. And with the exception of the stories profiled in the show’s pilot, all of the material will be new to the television show.

But why adapt such a beloved radio show in the first place? “We had no interest in doing television,” Glass confessed. “We didn’t care. We just tried to make them go away,” which is what he had always done when approached by networks to develop the show for TV. He told Showtime they’d have to find an independent filmmaker who he respected and who could prove to him the radio show could translate into images. Enter indie film maverick Christine Vachon, producer of “Storytelling,” “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” and “Velvet Goldmine,” whom Glass had gone to college with, strangely enough. “I thought immediately this was the kind of thing I wanted to be involved with,” Vachon said. “If we were going to actually do television, I wanted it to be something that would take us somewhere new and unusual.”

Despite cynicism from many of the show’s loyal fans about its visual transition, Glass remains optimistic about converting them. “I feel like if somebody has heard our radio show and watches any of the episodes, I believe we would win them over. We were just as skeptical that it couldn’t be done.” Glass says the decision to do the show was more about the challenge of wanting to do something new than anything else. “We thought it would be cool to work with pictures. We’re not doing it because we thought we would get rich or famous. It’s the Showtime network, so you don’t get rich.”

Showtime will deliver 40 episodes of the show over the next 4 years, though the first season comprises only six. Such ventures have made Glass a busy man, and the show’s hectic production schedule has forced him to air more reruns of the radio show than in years past. “It’s been a really busy year,” he said. “I’ve just been working all the time.” Not that he’s complaining. The show, in both incarnations, is clearly his passion, and he just wants to put out a high quality product. “The television show will be much, much smaller than our radio audience. We just thought it would be really cool to work with pictures. Let’s see if we can come up with something that has the feeling of the stories that we love. And if it doesn’t work, it’s not for lack of trying. We killed ourselves trying to figure it out”

“This American Life” premieres Thursday, March 22nd at 10:30 p.m. ET/PT on Showtime.

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