TV Talk: Joe Kenda recounts the cases of other cops on ‘American Detective’

Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.

On Investigation Discovery’s “Homicide Hunter,” Westmoreland County native Joe Kenda seemed like he retold cases from memory because he did: Episodes were based on cases he worked for the Colorado Springs, Colo., police department.

In his new series, “American Detective,” Kenda’s still working without a script even as he tells other investigators’ stories.

“I say whatever I want to say, and the only thing they eliminate from the track is profanity,” Kenda said in a December phone interview. “There is no piece of paper; nobody suggests lines to me. When we first started doing ‘Homicide Hunter,’ they threw a script in my lap, and I said, ‘I’m a policeman, not an actor. I got over playing dress-up when I was 5, and you should have, too.’ ”

The 10-episode first season of “American Detective” debuts three episodes Monday on new streaming service discovery+ and thereafter will drop one episode weekly on Wednesdays through Feb. 24. (It’s expected the episodes eventually also will air on cable’s ID channel, but there’s no time table for when they might make the move to linear TV.)

Discovery+ costs $4.99 per month with ads (or $6.99 without ads) and features new and library content from all the Discovery Networks, including Discovery Channel, TLC, HGTV and Food Network.

Kenda recounts some of his own cases in his upcoming book, “Killer Triggers” (out March 9 from Blackstone Publishing), but for “American Detective” he retells the stories of investigations by other homicide investigators.

“I have a lot of friends in the homicide business around the country, and some of them came to me and said, ‘You’ve gotta look at this,’ ” said Kenda, who grew up in Herminie, near Irwin, before attending the University of Pittsburgh. (Pre-pandemic, Kenda said he made it back to Western Pennsylvania with some regularity, visiting wife Kathy’s family, who run Sendell Motors in Greensburg.)

For “American Detective,” Kenda said the mandate was to find “elements that are very rare and all of them are mysteries. None of them are obvious as far as who did this.”

Kenda talks to the detectives involved, reads case files, then flies from his Virginia home to Knoxville, Tenn., where his portion is filmed as he walks through the case extemporaneously during an on-camera interview by the show’s producers.

“I retain everything as you would if you did what I did for a living,” Kenda said, noting his narration is recorded before the dramatic re-enactments get filmed. “They use what I say as a guide for how to do the rest of it. When they interview me, they’ll do a transcript for the director of the reenactment and use that to build an (episode) outline.”

“Homicide Hunter” ran for nine seasons before Kenda exhausted his own case files. Since “American Detective” culls its stories from investigators nationwide, there’s certainly fodder for more episodes depending on viewership and how that tune-in compares to expectations for the show among discovery+ programmers.

“Now the case goes to the jury,” Kenda said, chuckling, “and we’ll see what the verdict is.”