When Fox announced in June 2011 it was canceling “America’s Most Wanted” after 23 years, nobody was more surprised than John Walsh.
“Our ratings were great,” said Walsh, 66, the host of the show. “We owned Saturday nights.”
But financially, it had been a rocky few years for the Silver Spring-based television show. In 2010, “America’s Most Wanted” shut down its Los Angeles-based West Coast bureau and laid off one-third of its staff. There had been more budget cuts since then, and funds were tight.
A year later, “America’s Most Wanted” has a weekly spot on Lifetime. The show is operating with one-third of the staff and one-third of the budget it once had, but executives at Lifetime, the New York-based cable network that specializes in programming geared toward women, said the show has been successful.
“The minute we heard it might be available, we knew we wanted it,” said Rob Sharenow, executive vice president for programming at Lifetime. “We had a deal within weeks.”
Sharenow declined to discuss the show’s financial status but said it has boosted the network’s Friday night ratings by 50 percent.
“We’ve become leaner and meaner — we have to be in this economy,” said Roger Chiang, who has been working for the show for five years. “We have a producer who does three other jobs. I’m the CFO, COO and the executive in charge. It’s a collaborative effort.”
When the show started in the late 1980s, it was one of the few commercial television shows filmed in the Washington area, Chiang said. Qualified crew members were difficult to find — many relocated from Los Angeles to work on the program.
In the decades since, the rise of Washington-based Black Entertainment Television and Silver Spring’s Discovery Communications — the company behind Animal Planet and TLC — has created a larger base of television producers, directors and editors in the area.
“The proliferation of television production in D.C. has really mushroomed,” Chiang said. “We were the staple here in Washington for 20-something years.”
How the show started
Walsh, a hotel developer by training, was working on a $26 million project in Paradise Island, Fla., when his 6-year-old son was kidnapped from a department store and murdered in the summer of 1981.
Walsh and his wife lobbied for tougher laws governing sex offender registries and stricter sentences for those convicted of sex crimes and child abuse.
“All I wanted to do after that was try to change laws, to testify in Congress,” Walsh said.
He began spending more and more time in Washington and forged ties with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in Alexandria.
A few years later, executives from Fox asked Walsh whether he’d like to host the network’s first reality show.
He told them he wasn’t interested.
“I said ‘What is reality television? What is Fox? And who is Rupert Murdoch?,’ ” he recalled. “I told them, I don’t want to go to Hollywood. I’m not a showbiz guy.”
They agreed on a compromise: Walsh could film in the Washington area, where he’d be close to law enforcement officials. He agreed to give it a shot.
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