Here’s a surprise: Ira Glass on WBEZ.
So maybe having the station’s marquee star and “This American Life” host as your new afternoon show’s first guest wasn’t the best way to signal that you’ll be covering the waterfront of Chicago news and American ideas.
Maybe having Glass inaugurate “The Afternoon Shift with Steve Edwards,” the new daily show on the public radio station (FM 91.5) felt a little more like a recording from an in-house conference table — or a pledge drive that kept forgetting to ask for money — than a radio program intended for the metroplex.
Certainly asking Glass Monday to recall his own first show left some to wonder whether Edwards and crew were drawing parallels between the runaway hit “TAL,” as it is sometimes known, and the fledgling “ASSE,” as it will surely never be known.
But casting the strategy and symbolism of the thing aside, if you were to ask whether the Edwards-Glass conversation was good radio, the answer would be yes. Two first-rate on-air presences, talking about the medium they know so well, can’t help but engage anybody with the slightest interest in the infrastructure of things.
If you next asked whether “Afternoon Shift,” in its first three shows this week, has since settled down and reached outward to start to become the kind of show its makers say they want it to be — casual, calm, intelligent but not stuffy — that answer, too, is yes.
And to the credit of Edwards, 41, the former WBEZ newsmagazine host returning to the air after a stint in management, he made sure listeners heard that one listener who called in with a skeptical question: “What are you doing on this show when you’re not talking with Ira Glass?”
Airing from 2 p.m.-4 p.m. weekdays, “Afternoon Shift” is a mostly live interview and call-in show meant to greatly enrich WBEZ’s presence in its home city. In an interview before the show’s debut, Edwards said one of his models for it, in terms of tone and feel, if not content, is Canadian Broadcasting’s “Q,” the stellar arts program hosted by Jian Ghomeshi (and airing on WBEZ at 8 p.m. most weeknights).
Its arrival signals a new midday at WBEZ, hours between the National Public Radio morning and evening news programs that the station, in the next several years, intends to fill entirely with locally made shows. In another step down that road, “Eight Forty-Eight,” the longstanding weekday morning newsmagazine now hosted by station veteran Tony Sarabia, will double its daily running length, to two hours, “in the next couple of months,” midday executive producer Justin Kaufmann announced on the first “Afternoon Shift.”
The changes will be controversial — especially if the “BBC Newshour” and “Fresh Air” are eventually forced to migrate out of daytime hours — but they are welcome. A knock on WBEZ, from both outside and in, has been that it wasn’t doing enough to justify the first word in “Chicago Public Media,” the name of its corporate parent.
That’s not to say “Afternoon Shift” is all Chicago. Its early hours have included interviews on Greek debt and the world economy (with author and Economist columnist Philip Coggan), on the transportation bill in Washington, D.C.(with U.S. Rep. Robert Dold, of Kenilworth), on pornography and Playboy Clubs (with Gloria Steinem) and on super PACs and the history of corrupt elections (with political commentator Jonathan Alter).
The academics it talks to may wind up being drawn more from local universities than elsewhere, but pulling from Evanston, Chicago, Indiana and Illinois could hardly be called jingoism. And there’s been a healthy balance between WBEZ bloggers and reporters and outside authors and experts.
The first episodes have talked a little too much about the making of the show, and the thoughts involved in making the show. There’s a fine line between transparency, which can be an honest and endearing thing, and self-obsession, which can leave listeners rolling their eyes.
But a certain amount of mirror gazing is understandable in a new venture. You do need to explain, for instance, the decision to play an entire song each hour, in a segment known as “The Break Room,” because it flies in the face of what public radio usually does — and, as Kaufmann said, is usually used as a cover for technical difficulties.
The show is taking local news/traffic/weather breaks, with anchor Melba Lara at 20 and 40 past the hours, plus a longer newscast, including national news, at 3 p.m. Wednesdays feature a science segment with WBEZ reporter Gabriel Spitzer (whose “Clever Apes” science reporting has been a standout on the station recently).
So far, at least, the only other bit of “furniture” — newsspeak for a standing feature — is a sort of free-range Top Three list just before 3 p.m. Tuesday’s, for Valentine’s Day, covered some unusual ways to get closer to your true love; Wednesday’s, surprisingly but charmingly, was three quick bits of advice from a contestant on TV’s “Survivor.”
It’s more like an AM talk radio model than public radio or its listeners are used to. Handling callers and getting listeners to call in is exercising a new muscle on both sides of the radio. There’s been very little pre-production and not much, it sounds like, in the way of scripts, which gives the proceedings that casual, in-the-moment feel.
But under the stewardship of Edwards, a Kansas City native who hosted “Eight Forty-Eight” for eight years, the show retains public radio’s fundamental seriousness of purpose, a locally based discussion of issues and ideas of the sort that isn’t easy to find on Chicago radio.
Since arriving here, Edwards has come across as one of those local media people with national-caliber talent. And even after his four-plus years of not hosting a regular show, “Afternoon Shift” is bearing that out.
He acts not as star — it’s not “The Steve Edwards Show!” — but, truly, as host, guiding conversations, listening closely to his guests and asking good questions, especially such key follow-ups as, “What do you mean by that?”
Having Edwards back on the air is a boon to Chicago radio. And “The Afternoon Shift” feels like a good fit for him, for the station and for listeners who like a little intellectual meat on their mid-afternoon menu.
Twitter: @StevenKJohnson
