“I thought, what a great way to tackle this [issue]—with someone who had been through it,” says Adam Kassen, one of the series’ executive producers.
Ultimately, though, Nagao says she’s “ecstatic” about how the show turned out, and is hopeful that it will draw wider attention to the problem of wrongful convictions. Between 3 and 5 percent of U.S. prisoners are estimated to be innocent, which translates to an estimated 60,000 people currently serving time for crimes they didn’t commit.
When it comes to producing a television show, the resources needed to film a prisoner and bring their families and legal teams on board are immense, Nagao explains. And for the show, the strongest cases had families and lawyers already actively working to prove the prisoner’s innocence.
He defends the balance the show struck: “These are issues that affect us all,” he says. “It can happen in middle-class white communities, it can happen all over the place.”
