ABC is putting the finishing touches on its controversial show, “Homeland Security USA.”
The new, 13-episode series will track US border guards as they’re tasked with trying to stop people from sneaking into the country – by themselves and sometimes with contraband.
“They’re ordinary men and women working against an epic landscape,” executive producer Arnold Shapiro (“Big Brother”) wrote in a prepared statement regarding the Homeland Security officers who appear on the show.
Think of a show like “Cops” – if it focused entirely on one of the hottest of hot-button issues in the country.
“They have a job that is dangerous, difficult and always unpredictable,” Shapiro wrote.
“What viewers will see is powerful, dramatic, amazing and emotional – with unexpected moments of humor.”
ABC officials and the show’s producers have declined repeated requests for interviews about what viewers will see, specifically, in “Homeland Security USA.”
What’s apparent, based on information posted on ABC’s Web site, is that each episode will hopscotch around the US to follow various border-related incidents.
The debut episode (airing Jan. 6), will leap-frog from Los
Angeles International Airport – where a “voluptuous 20-year-old woman arrives from Switzerland with no working papers but a suitcase full of titillating surprises” – to a Washington State border crossing where smugglers are caught transporting drugs hidden in baby diapers.
Other segments include a search to find six undocumented
immigrants lost in the desert outside of Tucson, Ariz. and items seized at an International Mail Center in Carson, Calif., including a “delicacy” discovered to be barbecued bats.
Shapiro has admitted that the show will paint the Dept. of
Homeland Security in a positive light – a move that has enraged
some critics, who branded the show “propaganda” shortly after ABC picked it up last spring.
“I’m sure this will be as accurate as the rest of ‘reality’ TV,” one angry blogger wrote when the news first broke.
“I love investigative journalism, but that’s not what we’re
doing,” Shapiro told a reporter in the only interview he has
done to promote the series.
“This show is heartening. It makes you feel good about these people who are doing their best to protect us.”