Stepping out of her sleek Lexus hybrid in sky-high Prada stilettos, Nancy Glass cuts an intimidating figure: Tall and thin, perfectly blonded, coiffed and stylish.
And that intimidation lasts a full minute, until you begin to realize that—despite her six Emmys, a resume that includes everything from Inside Edition to Hollywood Squares, and her post at the helm of a 65-person TV production company—Glass would much rather play the class clown.
This becomes evident as soon as I point out that she and I both grew up in the Boston suburbs: suddenly she has reverted to an accent that would put Matt Damon to shame. “Oh my gawd! Wicked pissah,” she exclaims, and then the quiz is on. “What’s do you call a cop car?” she asks. “Uh … a cruisah?” I venture, dubious. “A cruisah!” she crows gleefully, reminding me that a school bus is, of course, a “losah cruisah,” that soda is “tonic” and a water fountain a “bubblah.”
We’re laughing hysterically, but no one at her company, Nancy Glass Productions, looks terribly surprised. Apparently, this is how Glass rolls. “I love anything funny,” she says. “My husband always says I’ll do anything for a laugh. And I’m like, ‘And? Problem is?’ If you’re around me all day, everything is a joke.”
Considering her sense of humor—which is, as we would have said in our respective youths, “wicked funny”—and her warm personality, it makes sense that Glass has steered her career toward lifestyle programming.

Her thriving 9-year-old company is a darling of Home & Garden Television (HGTV), where shows like Save My Bath, Spice Up My Kitchen, Rip and Renew and Mission: Organization regularly rank prime time slots. They’ve put together shows for Fine Living Network, including new one, Worth Every Penny, and they’re creating DIY Network programming including the forthcoming series Kitchen Commando. And they produce hours of broadband content, plus programming for the much-hyped new media destination FEARnet and two XM satellite radio shows, including The Pet Hour, which Glass co-hosts with her director of operations Cindy Connors, (and which she sees as something like Car Talk for the pet set).

The way Glass tells it, her company’s focus on HGTV-type programming came about simply because their programming was successful and the network kept coming back for more. But she’s become something of a design guru herself, hosting two seasons of an HGTV show called Smart Design, and even briefly dabbling in her own housewares line.
But the truth is, Glass is a natural at design—as evidenced by her stylish Main Line home, and by the eco-friendly Bala Cynwyd office she recently designed herself, with creative solutions like outdoor glass walls to section off cubicles and signature green touches like Frank Gehry’s classic corrugated cardboard Ripple chairs. Playfulness meets purpose in Glass’s wacky take on modernism; consider the sound booth where she records her Iams-sponsored Pet Hour. Since Glass is allergic to normal soundproofing, the walls are literally lined with hundreds of (hypoallergenic) Ty brand plush stuffed dogs. “I had read an article years ago that Avery Fisher Hall tested their soundproofing with stuffed animals,” she shrugs “And I thought, ‘I’ll do that.’”

Hypoallergenic or not, The Pet Hour certainly stands in sharp contrast to Glass’ previous career, as a television news reporter and anchor for nationally syndicated programs. But Glass says moving from TV anchor to TV producer never seemed like much of a jump, because now, as then, “It’s really about the storytelling. Getting the scoops—of course that’s so much fun. Beating someone to a story is unbelievable. But it’s all in the telling. And if you do design shows, the star of your show doesn’t talk—it’s the design—so you have to be a good storyteller.”
Still, Glass’ career was made on the air. She was on camera nearly from the start—even in her early days as an intern at WBZ, then Boston’s NBC affiliate, she was on the air by her senior year in college. (“I was terrible,” she says. “I had such a thick Boston accent—my parents asked me to use a different name.”)
After Glass moved to Philadelphia in early 1980s, with her then husband, she took the anchor seat here, on KYW-3’s Evening Magazine. And from there, her career took off: She anchored the nightly newsmagazine American Journal and served as weekend anchor and senior correspondent for Inside Edition. “I did a lot of crime, interviewing John Bobbit, Amy Fisher, the wife of the Oklahoma City bomber,” she says. “And Jeffrey Dahmer: I was the only person he talked to from the day he was arrested to the day he died.”
Those were big stories—but to Glass it’s all old news. “I hate talking about the past because I always think that people who talk about the past long for something that they no longer have, and I don’t. I don’t long for what’s gone, I dream about the future. And that’s been the greatest thing ever.”
So, after 12 years of daily commutes from Philadelphia to Manhattan, Glass called it off. “After commuting up to New York for so many years,” she says. “I just couldn’t do it anymore. My kids were at an age when I had to put them first. When you’re on the air, you have to put yourself first; and when you have kids you can’t do that.” So, she made the choice to focus on her family—and that meant re-imagining her career.

And it took a lot of imagination to leave the multimillion-dollar New York studios behind and start a company at her dining room table. Glass and a (former) partner counted on a great deal of experience and more than a little false bravado to get things going. “The dog used to bark every time the phone would ring,” she recalls, “and people would say, ‘Are you working from home?’ I’d say ‘No, no!’”
But, she says, “I was never going give up. When I get started, I’m like a dog on a pork chop. Giving up was never even a possibility. I don’t experiment; I go for it, which is probably wildly foolish. People tell me I’m psychotically optimistic. And I am.”
That’s a big part of what makes it possible for Glass to press forward in a cutthroat industry. To get a sense of just how competitive it really is, consider a docu-soap series Glass has been pitching to various networks, on college a cappella groups. Glass’ employees urged her to call her son Max—a dead ringer for Prince Harry “except he was bar mitzvahed”—and a member of a top University of Pennsylvania a cappella group. Max said he would consider it—but that he was fielding calls from two other interested production companies. (When I ask Glass how the dispute ended, she looks at me incredulously: “I said to him, ‘I’m your original producer. Think about it.’”)

These days, Nancy Glass Productions is moving well beyond just home design programming. “Whatever we want to pursue, that’s what we do,” says Glass, “whether it’s home design, exploring, docu-soaps, or anything else.” She’s become a pro at harvesting local talent: Right now she’s looking to sell a show called The Princess of Poker, about a Main Line mother of five who’s also a professional poker player. And NGP recently partnered with Mark Burnett Productions to work on their biggest series yet, dubbed Race to the Bottom of the Earth, featuring four explorers, including Gladwyne’s Todd Carmichael, the La Colombe owner and extreme sportsman. The proposed program will follow four explorers racing 700 miles across Antarctica to the South Pole. Glass intends to be there: “I’ll be wearing my sable,” she jokes.
Looking back, she says, “Starting this company turned out to be the best thing I ever did. I made the choice, and I’m proud to do the kinds of shows that we do—national shows out of Philadelphia. And we don’t make a big deal about it. I don’t need anyone to know, and that’s what’s really fun about it—to have achieved what you wanted and not have to make a show of it.”
Still, not everything is as effortless as it looks. When we stopped by Glass’ Main Line house on a recent day, the driveway was packed with cars of NGP staff, on site to re-shoot a segment for a Fine Living Network show. (Apparently, a show dubbed Splurge had been renamed Worth Every Penny, when it became obvious that the “splurges” weren’t all that lavish. So, all the introductions had to be redone.)
Fortunately, Glass’ house is beautiful enough to serve as a TV set in a pinch.
When she moved in, she admits, it “was one of these houses you walk into and it’s like, ‘Don’t drink and decorate.’ Everything was pink and red and blue.” But Glass rearranges walls like most people move furniture. So, she overhauled the entire place herself—without any help from a decorator.
After all, she says, “Just from doing all the shows, you learn. Now that we’ve done hundreds of hours of this type of programming, I know how to do [renovations]: Nothing’s a big project. I know what it should cost, and I know how to do it.”
Glass’s style is what you might call elegant-eclectic. On herself, it’s a mix of jewelry she made herself, (she studied jewelry design at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), and of designer goods (picked up on Bluefly.com, since she insists, “I never pay retail”).

The same goes for her house. “I love the mixed and matched aesthetic,” she explains. In one room, chairs Glass says were trash-picked sit near fabulous couches from the 1970s. In another, high Philippe Starck metal chairs stand by a counter, while the windows are softened by curtains Glass made herself.
For Glass, her home is an unending work in progress. “Doing what we do, we all go home and constantly want to redo our houses. You just go home and look at things totally differently,” she explains. And she knew her daughter Sloane—a 16-year-old who’s now on camera herself, on the syndicated Teen Kids News program—had picked up the gene when Sloane came to her and said, “I want to raise the ceiling in my bedroom.”

“When I was a kid I didn’t get to pick anything—not even what I wore—so with my kids I’m like, ‘OK we’ll try it.’” Now, her daughter’s room may be the only kid’s room on the Main Line with an Ingo Maurer chandelier—but it works.

Glass’ husband, the Inside Edition Executive Producer and author Charles Lachman, sometimes teases about the tiny vegetable garden Glass has out back, where she grows tomatoes and, for no easily explicable reason, a few stalks of corn. And when she breaks out the power sander, he’s been known to call her Role-Reversal Barbie.
But for Glass, creating a beautiful home and a beautiful workspace have been central to building a beautiful life. “I happen to love design. It’s very nourishing,” she says. And career-wise, things have change only in relative terms: “In the news business, I used to ask people who they’re sleeping with,” she laughs, “and now I ask what they’re sleeping on.”

1. what a liar jeffrey was interwived by stone phillips, and several other people, not just by her.

   Posted by me | January 5, 2010, 1:17 am