Men's Journal

The Wanted's co-executive producer, Charlie Ebersol, filming over the Congo. Photo credit: Courtesy Echo Ops Productions LLC

NBC’s new reality show The Wanted follows the negotiating efforts and ground tactics of a diplomatic and military dream team as they pursue suspected war criminals and terrorists across the globe. Co-executive producer Charlie Ebersol, son of legendary NBC Sports chairman Dick Ebersol, spoke with Men’s Journal about the notion of disempowering bad guys with television cameras.

Interviewed by Martin Mulkeen

MJ: Tell me about the team you’ve assembled.

CE: We have Adam Ciralsky, who’s the investigative journalist and my co-executive producer. Scott Tyler is a retired Navy SEAL. Roger Carstens is a retired Green Beret, lieutenant colonel. And David Crane is one of the foremost international experts in war crimes and diplomacy. He was the first American to run a war-crimes tribunal since Nuremberg.

Why would former military personnel and intelligence officers want to give up their anonymity to be on television?

I’ve never had to fight so much with the people who are supposed to be my on-air talent about putting them on air. There’s a joke that goes around all the time during production. For the first four months of the show, all I would hear from Scott, Roger, and Adam was, “My community would never support this.” I thought it was funny, and I didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. But after spending six months with these guys, I understood: Their whole lives are about not being in front of the camera. Scott’s job as a sniper cell leader was to completely disappear in plain sight. And Roger, as a lieutenant colonel in the Green Berets, his job was to be in the trenches. So it was unnatural for them to be in front of the camera, but they were highly motivated to be a part of this show because the opportunity to effect change was huge. Six months after Scott got out of the Navy SEALs, he was on an airplane with me to the Middle East and I said, “I’m very glad you’re doing this, but why are you doing this?” He said that when Adam originally called him, Adam had this Bible quote that he told him: “The sword enters the world when justice is delayed or justice is denied.”

How does an operation begin?

We go into the area Adam’s investigating. Scott is on the tactical ground doing surveillance, finding the suspect. Roger is bridging the gap between the two of them, handling both strategy and tactics, and David Crane handles the negotiations with the government. Our first and foremost goal is to work closely with the governments as an independent actor, coming to them and saying, look, why is this guy still free? And second, what needs to occur for justice to have a shot at happening? It’s not a question of whether or not the guy is guilty or innocent as much as it’s a question of very serious accusations. In some cases they’re not even accusations—in some cases the guy’s been convicted in other countries. In every case, there’s a U.S. nexus: The suspect is targeting Americans, has killed Americans, is accused of killing Americans, or is living in America.

If the body of evidence is usually so strong, and in some cases the suspects are living among us in plain sight, why haven’t they been apprehended already?

Generally it’s one of three things. The first one is, the government didn’t know that they were here. The second one is, the lack of legal foundation or ability to apprehend them. The third thing is that there is a lot of stuff going on right now. Two wars, the focus on anti-terrorism, the focus on homeland security, all these other things.

How did you decide who you would target?

Adam and I put together a list of the 500 most wanted people from Interpol’s list and a number of other international government lists, and then we created our own Litmus test—we require each suspect to meet a certain burden of proof based on all of our conversations with judiciaries, law enforcement groups, et cetera. There’s an action element, there’s an investigative element, there’s a diplomatic element, and each one is given sort of equal weight so that each one has an opportunity to affect justice, which is the purpose of the show.

Once you catch the suspects, what do you do with them?

We have the authority to investigate as journalists and citizens, but we don’t have the authority to arrest. We don’t take custody. It is always the local, state, or federal government that effects the arrest. But the suspects are wanted for such serious crimes that it becomes borderline irrelevant whether or not we would want to effect the arrest ourselves. We look to do this as a matter of justice. At the end of the day, you want the government to step in and do their duty. All the tactical stuff—helicopters, car chases, all of that—is really a precursor or catalyst for all the stuff that needs to be done: international diplomacy and international negotiations. It’s not Dog the Bounty Hunter. The guy didn’t steal $20 from a register and bail, you know what I mean? In the case of the first episode, this guy’s organization is responsible, admittedly and openly responsible, for more beheadings in Iraq than any other group; for basically inventing the vehicle-borne IED; for running terror cells in the United States and targeting Americans.

Is there any concern that a reality show about how to capture terrorists could compromise intelligence-gathering techniques?

Well, we screened the show for 400 people in Washington, DC—members of Congress, DOD, DOJ, State Department, DHS, etc. The response was overwhelmingly positive and we were offered more and more support.

We spend an inordinate amount of time getting into the nitty-gritty of exactly what ends up on the show. First, we hold ourselves to the highest journalistic standards. We’re pulling back the fourth wall and really trying to give people access to every aspect of the investigation, but at the same time, we also want to make sure that it is protective. We worked closely with a number of advisers and counselors currently in and out of government, international law, international intelligence, domestic intelligence, domestic law, and they vetted everything we did with respect to whether we were compromising current investigations. Our goal was to be 100 percent independent, so in every single case we looked at, we did so without partnering with homeland security or any international judiciary.

Also, I’d say that there is something about putting terrorists on camera that disempowers them. What would have happened if there had been cameras in Florida at the flight school, and people had been caught on camera? Somebody might have sat on that plane and looked at the guy next to him and just been a little bit more wary.

A recent New York Times article noted the potential conflict of interest in the cooperation between former intelligence officers and a news outlet like NBC. Does it compromise the objectivity of investigative journalists to be working toward a specific end alongside military personnel?

Criticism is healthy, and we want to have a good dialogue with those who have seen the show. In terms of conflict of interest, every network on television uses former military and intelligence people on their shows. CBS, FOX, and ABC all contract former generals and intelligence people as correspondents and consultants. The difference here is that we ask them to do what they spent their lives learning to do. In a way, I think we are more honest with our use than other shows are.

Who will this program appeal to?

We want the people who watch 24 to tune in to this show because it looks and feels like 24. We want the people who watch 60 Minutes to tune in to this show because they are going to get the same level of investigation, and we want the people who watch the History Channel to tune in because we are going to spend the time laying out what happened. 9/11 didn’t happen in a vacuum. The Rwandan genocide didn’t happen in a vacuum. Iraq isn’t happening in a vacuum. But there are tangible answers. There is a lot of gray area, but at the end of the day, justice is fairly black and white. If there are accusations being made against you by your peers, and you live in a just society, then you have a responsibility to face justice, assuming those accusations are coming from a valid source.

Programs like 24 have been criticized for their sensationalism and for instilling a lot of unnecessary fear in the American public. How do you toe the line between entertainment and fear-mongering?

Well, look at 24 and the dialogue it started—about everything from terrorism to the application of justice, to interrogation. Entertainment has the ability to do that if it’s not preaching. That’s why the show is not political. We don’t say whether this guy is guilty or innocent. Our position is simple: We have these really highly trained individuals—Navy SEALs, Green Berets, CIA, DIA—and they’re the best in the world. If we were to take those skill sets and apply them to finding the individuals that we sometimes lie in bed at night scared of, what would happen?

Oh, believe me, there is wish fulfillment in the show. When you look at the last eight years of movies, and you look at who the superheroes are, it’s all about the average Joe going out and doing these things. But what happens when you take the highest trained soldiers that the U.S. government has to offer, and the top intelligence people and the top diplomatic people, and you have them actually apply everything that they’re doing to the pursuit of justice?

Sensationalism, fear-mongering, and xenophobia—they’re all very serious things that we are very aware of. You have to find the happy medium between being exciting, but at the same time making sure the viewership knows that absolutely everything you’re doing is real. We don’t do any re-creations. We’re embracing the idea of justice, not mocking it.

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Watch the trailer for NBC’s The Wanted:

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