In 25 seasons of hunting bad guys on “America’s Most Wanted,” John Walsh learned to do one thing really well — “how to catch these bastards and bring them back to justice.”
It’s with those words that the 68-year-old host opens his new CNN show, “The Hunt with John Walsh” — premiering Sunday at 9 p.m. — which, like its predecessor, will spotlight stories of ongoing criminal investigations of fugitives to provide the public with information to help lead to their capture.
It’s a very different show; I think it’s lusher, it will slow down, it will focus you in on what the crime is.
- John Walsh
But unlike “AMW,” which Walsh produced himself, “The Hunt” is produced by Zero Point Zero Production (the same team behind CNN’s “Anthony Bourdain Parts Unknown”), and puts an emphasis on interviews with victims, loved ones and law enforcement.
“It’s a very different show; I think it’s lusher, it will slow down, it will focus you in on what the crime is,” Walsh says over lunch at Landmarc in midtown Manhattan. “It’s not so much about the crime, it’s about the people and how it impacts communities.”
The first of the eight-episode series will focus on just one case, that of Shane Miller, who is suspected of murdering his wife and two daughters (ages 8 and 4) in their northern California home in 2013. The most the show will do is two cases in an hour — in stark contrast to “AMW,” which Walsh admits got very frantic toward the end of its run.
“It sort of lost the quality television that we started out with. It became overwhelming and I lost track of the fact that we couldn’t be the clearinghouse for every unsolved case,” he says. “The re-creations were two-minutes long, you never got a sense about the victims, never got a sense of what was going on. We were old and tired.”
Indeed Walsh spent 24 years in continuous production for “AMW,” which aired on Fox from 1988-2011 and on Lifetime from 2011-12 (catching more than 1,200 criminals in the process).
“I got to take the last year off and really be home for the first time in my whole adult life,” he says.
Walsh used the break to spend time with his first grandchild and ride horses on his Florida ranch, while still raising money for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. And though he caught 44 criminals through his Web site in the time he was off the air, he’s eager to put the bad guys back in the spotlight of TV.
“Television is still the most powerful medium,” Walsh says. “The bottom line is 99 percent of the guys I caught, I caught them off the television show.”