The new hit TV drama, Fire Country, explores the world of firefighting from the unique point of view of the inmates who fight alongside local firefighters in a special California camp program.  While the Northern California town where the show is set is fictional, the California Conservation Camp Program is very real.

As of August 2022, there were 1,669 incarcerated people housed in conservation camps in California. In addition to incarcerated wildland fire crew members, volunteers also work as support staff for the camps and include positions such as cooks, laundry workers, landscapers, and water treatment plant workers. No inmate is involuntarily assigned to work in a fire camp, and all must have ‘minimum custody’ status – the lowest classification for inmates based on sustained good behavior – to be eligible. Inmates receive only two weeks of training before being sent out, often without state-of-the-art fire-fighting equipment.

“We are right on the fire’s edge,” Justin Schmollinger – who oversees the Conservation Camp Program for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) – told Smithsonian Magazine recently. “You’re down there at times fighting fire with hand tools and you’re seeing a lot of fire with no water, so it gets intense.”

It’s grueling, dangerous work, something that the show’s creator and star Max Thieriot knew about first-hand, growing up in Occidental, California fire country. The town had a population of only 1000 people, and many of his friends joined the fire department before he moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting.

In 2017, Theiriot landed a starring role as Navy Seal Clay Spenser in SEAL Team but when he moved back home after Covid shut down the sixth season of the series, he decided to write a pilot script inspired by his hometown. “I’d never tried writing anything,” he told a TV Critics’ press conference, “but I think because it was personal, it was easy to create and move forward with it.”

The actor and writer plays Bode Donovan, an inmate hoping to redeem himself and shorten his prison sentence by volunteering for the California Conservation Camp Program. When he’s unexpectedly assigned to the camp in his former hometown, where his estranged father is fire chief and many of his closest friends still work as firefighters, he’s forced to face his past.

The actor has vivid memories of growing up around the often-devastating fires that threatened his hometown. “I remember recently there was a large portion of Santa Rosa destroyed with lives tragically lost, including firefighters,” he continued. “It was one of those things that when that fire came, it was so fast and so explosive that the firefighters really didn’t have time to try and stop it.”

Thieriot also recalls one scare when his mother’s home was at risk. “We ended up evacuating my mom in the middle of the night,” he adds, “so we were all there, with ash pouring down on us, trying to help her and our neighbors and load up everyone’s animals and get them somewhere with no vegetation around.”

When Thieriot promoted the new series prior to its October launch, he was still filming SEAL Team in Los Angeles and Fire Country in Vancouver, Canada. “Life is crazy, and I’ve got a couple of kids to throw in there… but I’m young and I can keep up and I like staying busy,” he said at that time.

Last month, however, his secret was finally revealed when his SEAL Team character was killed off abruptly in a tragic shooting at the end of the sixth season, clearing the way for his role in the new hit show that was quickly renewed.

“Fire Country is my baby and something I’ve poured my heart into, and I love what I’m doing now,” he told one TV website shortly after the episode aired. “But is there a part of me that wished that somehow, I could have done both? Of course, there is.”