This American Life ... on TV!!!

Serene and myself are big fans of the National Public Radio Chicago Public Radio program, This American Life. (Check out their official website as well) We love the little memoirs, narratives, interviews and field recordings that emerge each week with this program. Thus, the both of us are greatly anticipating the debut of This American Life (TAL) on the Showtime Channel tomorrow. However, while on Boing Boing today, I was delighted to find out that not only is there a viral teaser out there on the internet, also one of the segments has been entirely illustrated by Chris Ware, a favorite comic artiste of mine. Click on the link above and you'll get to view the entire teaser segment. After watching this, all I can say is that I can't wait to see how they translate what is a very successful radio program on to the boob tube :)

Update:
I should have looked more carefully, but there are a bunch of trailers for TAL on their website. I've embedded them below. Also, I thought that I didn't really articulate why I liked this show so much. I think that it's a combination of things - Ira Glass's superb production and editing, the soundtrack that they use and the little stories that they tell. At the end of the day, I think that TAL presents to us tiny 'ethnographies' of everyday life and continues Studs Turkle's tradition of interviewing everyday people to get a better picture of how society functions.

Update#2:
If you check the comments, WD45 has corrected me that TAL is not produced by NPR but by Chicago Public Radio and distributed by PRI international. My apologies for that mistake. That's what you get for growing up in a country where all radio is owned by the government in one way or another. I must admit that I had the misconception that all public radio in the US was controlled or associated by NPR in some way. My bad :(