Atlanta now home to Fox's 'America's Most Wanted' with John Walsh and son
Published in Entertainment News
ATLANTA — John Walsh is synonymous with true crime TV. He practically invented the genre.
His son Adam was abducted and murdered in 1981, and Walsh has been pursuing justice for other victims ever since.
His groundbreaking show, “America’s Most Wanted,” ran on Fox for 23 years, from 1988 to 2011, capturing more than 1,150 fugitives in the process.
“AMW” now back on Fox in its third revamped season, returned earlier this week. Elizabeth Vargas hosted the first rebooted season, before Fox brought back Walsh with his son Callahan Walsh to co-host last year.
This is the first season “AMW” is shooting at Georgia Public Broadcasting headquarters in Atlanta, moving from Los Angeles last year. Reenactments have also been filmed in metro Atlanta.
“They’re giving us this wonderful deal,” John Walsh said in a Zoom interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution from his home in West Palm Beach, Florida, referencing Georgia’s generous tax credits. “We have been treated wonderfully. It’s been first class. Cal and I am Florida boys so the flight is a lot shorter than Los Angeles.”
The concept has remained consistent: the Walsh team highlights criminals on the run and missing children with hopes viewers might be able to provide usable tips. They now use aging techniques to approximate what the alleged murderers or kidnapped kids look like today, which could be helpful if the cases have gone cold for several years. They also bring into the studio affected family members or experts to discuss issues like the fentanyl crisis.
The Fox commitment for the show is far more modest than it was in the late 1990s and 2000s when a new episode aired every Saturday night. Last year, it aired six episodes, and Fox has committed to seven more this spring, including a special retrospective on the 12 most notable captures in the show’s history.
“We caught seven guys and recovered two missing kids last year,” said Walsh, who at 79 has no intention to retire from this type of work anytime soon. “It’s nice to be back in the major leagues on Fox!”
Walsh spent his decade away from Fox pursuing other TV-related ventures. He’s been a spokesman for Atlanta-based Justice Network and hosted CNN’s “The Hunt With John Walsh” and ID’s “In Pursuit With John Walsh.”
But this show is his true passion. What’s different is the way the segments can now be disseminated. It’s not just live viewing anymore. The episodes are available on demand on Hulu, and clips are sent out to major social media platforms.
“We got a capture six months after the original airdate last year, which didn’t typically happen on the original show, because someone streamed it,” said Callahan Walsh, who is executive director of the Florida branch of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, a nonprofit group his parents, John and Revé Drew Walsh, co-founded in 1984.
Callahan Walsh was just 4 when the show debuted in 1988. He grew up on set, became a production assistant, then began producing his father’s segments. “I would oversee the re-creations, which were so much fun to make,” he said. “They were like mini-movies casting actors and stunt drivers and using pyrotechnics.”
John Walsh said he’s proud of his son and is happy to share the spotlight.
“He’s a good, young guy,” he said. “He has a lot of good habits and discipline. I know he can fill my boots.”
John Walsh’s intensity on screen as he nears his eighth decade has not waned. On episodes that aired last year, he had no compunction calling fugitives “scum” and “dirtbags.”
There are naturally far more cases than they can cover, especially given the limited number of episodes.
“The cases are so hard,” the elder Walsh said. “It’s hard to turn people down. Cal is a little more objective than I am. He can pick the right guys to focus on.”
Callahan Walsh said watching both his parents work with such vigor to this day still leaves him “in awe.”
“I’m here to pick up the slack and keep this going because there are so many guys out there and so many families desperate for justice,” he said. “There will always be new cases. As we always say, justice delayed is not justice denied.”
For the victims’ families, capturing the bad guys “will do nothing to bring back their loved ones, but it will help them finish a chapter in their life and start writing a new chapter,” the younger Walsh said. “That hole left by Adam is filled little by little by the other families we help.”
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'AMERICA’S MOST WANTED'
Rating: TV- 14
How to watch: 9 p.m. ET Mondays on Fox, available the next day on Hulu
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©2025 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Visit at ajc.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
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