This American Life on Showtime

I got a note from This American Life that they're joining Penn and Teller and the rest of the fine programming on Showtime with a TV version of their hard-to-classify radio show.

NEW BEGINNINGS, PART TWO: Last week Showtime made it official: we're going to produce a series for them, a television version of This American Life. We shot a pilot last year, and the full series will begin broadcasting in the fall or winter of 2006. We'll continue making the radio show while we do the TV show. Again: the radio show will stay on the air.

What we can say about the series: It doesn't look a TV newsmagazine. It's shot to look like a movie. Widescreen. Beautiful lighting. And the stories feel just like the stories on the radio show. When we started the pilot, we weren't sure that'd be possible. Now we're convinced it is. We'll give more details — and hopefully some previews — in the coming months.

We subscribe to both HBO and Showtime (Cinemax and Starz and company come along for the ride in the package price) pretty much exclusively for the original programming and NOT for the movies that have been on DVD for 9 months. When Showtime cancelled Dead Like Me, I was pretty disappointed, but this is a good move for them.

They also say they're going to be converting their archives to streaming MP3 (which I'll gladly capture to file) instead of that RealAudio only setup they've had for years. I love their show, but can't listen very often because I either have to listen at the appointed time or deal with the inconvenience of streaming-only audio.