There have been plenty of TV shows about cops, prisons and drug addicts, but there’s never been a show that gives you a real-time look at criminals at work — until now.
“American Underworld,” which debuts Monday on Discovery, is an extended, firsthand look at illegal activities. The cameras follow a coke dealer, a meth maker, a car-theft ring and a pimp, among others.
It’s a first for a major network; they usually stay away from deliberately going out and recording crimes, for fear they could be prosecuted as accessories.
In the first episode, the show’s creator, Mark Allen Johnson, interviews a coke kingpin in Los Angeles, visits the house where an illegal steroid maker whips up his drugs and watches a girl engage in the dangerous “shake ’n’ bake” method of making crystal meth.
When filming a show like this, they had to take precautions, including obscuring locations, blurring out faces and changing voices, says executive producer Lisa Andreae.
To protect the parties involved, Andreae says, the production company went through endless meetings with lawyers to make sure that they were not breaking any laws.
“It was a pretty tricky process,” Andreae says. “We had a lot of legal advice before we went out and shot anything and certainly spoke to criminal lawyers and Discovery lawyers and production [company] lawyers to make sure we weren’t crossing any lines.”
Mostly, it meant that Johnson was merely a camera-toting fly on the wall.
“He’s there documenting it, while not getting involved in any way,” says Andraea.
Most times, Johnson didn’t know where he was going in advance, didn’t touch anything illegal and didn’t take any hidden-camera footage. He also had to make sure that he didn’t say anything that would make it seem as if he was encouraging illicit activity.
Greenlighting a show like this has surprised other TV producers.
“All I can guess, in terms of the law, is that the real-world risk isn’t big enough to worry about,” says David Page of David Page Productions.
Adds 44 Blue’s Rasha Drachkovitch, “We used to joke the three Ps — prisons, prostitutes and police — are good for ratings because they’re so edgy, but this is taking it to the next level.”