TAL, as has been apparent for years, is really the opposite of documentary reportage. It’s more like sociology, wherein the paradigm is set and specific circumstances are nipped, tucked, torqued, and squeezed until they fit the theme. Radio listeners can’t really fight through Glass’s scrim, so they have to take his word that the story is what he says it is. In the harsh light of television, however, the affectations of the radio show become glaringly clear. You can see how determined Glass is to bestow small breakthrough moments on his protagonists, whether they’re aware of them or not. We’re told, for instance, that the religious father of a lapsed-Mormon woman has come to a tentative understanding with his daughter after seeing her boyfriend play Jesus in a photo shoot. But mostly, she still just seems pissed off, and he remains a doctrinaire bore. Then there’s the rancher who loves his one-of-a-kind, tourist-attracting bull (“Chance”) so much that he clones him (creating “Second Chance”). The man is said to have learned a gentle lesson about unintended consequences after the clone gores him in the testicles. But actually he doesn’t seem to have learned much of anything. He still believes Second Chance will be bankable, once the bull gets the testicle-goring out of his system. Mostly, the rancher seems either economically needy or a bit touched.

In a short introductory piece, an elderly guy who visits his wife’s grave three times a week, but also brings along a TV set for company, is seen as just another piece of this magically odd tapestry we call America. There almost certainly are some depths here—the loneliness of losing a spouse, the poignancy of aging, perhaps a touch of senile-onset dementia—but we’re directed to see him as simply quirky, a guy doing his thing, man. “Well,” Glass says, “it’s This American Life.”

TAL lives at a kind of permanent 70 degrees, moderate humidity. Everyone says his or her piece, is shown to have a flaw, then is revealed as a pretty all right person in the end. The TV show comes alive, as TV always does, when there’s real anger and passion. The filmmaker and actor G. J. Echternkamp goes home to come to terms with his stepfather. The guy is Frank Garcia, most awesomely the bassist in a band called OXO, which had a hit back in the ’80s called “Whirly Girl.” Now he’s fat, hairy, drunk, and completely disengaged. Frank and G.J.’s mom scream at each other in spasms of mutual distrust and miscomprehension, and she tries, within her limited emotional range, to explain why she was such a bad parent.

G.J. starts from a position of radical empathy for Mom, but makes a classic Glassian turn, realizing that Mom is feeding the dysfunction: She’s as crazy and narcissistic as Frank is. He, still fat and hairy, but maybe not so much of a drunk as G.J. thought, turns out to be a decent guy after all, if flawed in the way we all are: “I want the best for you,” Frank tells G.J. at the end of the segment. This narrative turn might have worked on radio, but on TV, these sloppy, damaged (and completely riveting) characters don’t settle nicely into the Jell-O mold that Glass-as-producer has poured them into. From the start, G.J.’s mom is quite clearly unhinged, and only the most compliant viewer will accept the easy closure Glass imposes on the action.