Todd Chrisley Talks Life After Prison and The Chrisleys: Back to Reality

The Chrisley family, stars of one of USA Network’s most successful shows Chrisley Knows Best, certainly know how to make an entrance that makes great television.

Todd Chrisley and his wife Julie were indicted by a federal grand jury in August 2019 on 12 counts including conspiracy to commit bank fraud, wire fraud and tax evasion and were found guilty on every count by a jury of their peers.

On May 27, 2025, President Trump called Savannah Chrisley, one of their daughters who had spent much of the last few years appealing to Trump to release her parents, from the Oval Office to tell her that he intended to grant the pair full Presidential pardons.

This would make for television gold, as long as the producers of The Chrisleys: Back to Reality, a series that was already in production for Lifetime when the family got the call, could capture it.

Savannah, who has been on camera for a large portion of her life, then calls Nicole Blais, showrunner of the Bunim/Murray Productions project.

“We got the phone call. We knew it was going to happen within 24 hours but you don’t know when,” Bunim/Murray’s Jesse Daniels told Deadline.

There were two major challenges for the production team. Firstly, they had shut down production as they were coming to the end of filming, with only a week of pick up interviews to do. Secondly, Todd and Julie Chrisley were both in different states, as were the rest of the family.

Todd Chrisley was being released from a minimum-security federal prison camp in Pensacola, FL, Julie Chrisley was being released from the Federal Medical Center in Lexington, KY, and the rest of the family lives near Nashville.

Farnaz Farjam, one of the show’s executive producers, told Deadline that the production hustled to find a way to capture all three elements. “The family divided so Chase [Chrisley] went with some family friends to go get Julie, while Savannah went with friends to get Todd. They slept in their cars. Some of the family friends helped us and got a lot of cell phone footage because it happened so fast,” she said.

“But you don’t know what they’re capturing. You’re explaining to them how to hold the iPhone the best you can. You’re at the edge of your seat until you get all the footage ingested, and then you start going through it, and you’re like, ‘Oh my god, this is really good. Ok, good, they did it,” she added.

The team also hired local shooters to capture extra footage and had cameras waiting for the family for when they got home.

“It’s a true immersive experience, because we’re stitching together shots from our people and the camera crew that we’ve hired on the spot, with cell phone footage that is being shot in real time. It becomes an emotional experience… you feel like you’re there with alongside the family as their parents are getting out,” added Daniels.

It was a wild way to capture the end of the six-year, white-collar saga.

Another phone call that was key to all of this was one from Lifetime to Bunim/Murray. The two companies had worked with each other over the years on a number of projects including Surviving R Kelly and executives at the A+E Networks channel approached the Banijay-owned company after the Chrisleys got in touch with them.

“Lifetime wanted this to be the raw and real lives of who the Chrisleys are now, and how they are coping with mom and dad behind bars. That’s what we were tasked with capturing,” said Farjam.

The eight-part series, which premieres tonight (September 1) as part of a two-night launch event, kicks off with a recap of what’s been going on in the family’s world including Savannah taking custody of her younger siblings, Chloe and Grayson, and Chase addressing some life struggles while building his new business and navigating his relationship with girlfriend Jodi. Todd’s mother Nanny Faye is back and Julie’s parents Harvey and Pam turn up for the first time.

“The family has felt they have nothing to hide. That was their message to us when we first met them, that they want to open up as much as possible to the world about what they’re going through, the good, the bad, the ugly and everything in between. We were just there to document it,” added Daniels.

Chrisley Knows Best, which was produced by All3Media’s Maverick Television, ran for ten seasons on USA Network between 2014 and 2023. It was filmed in a more comedic, reality series-style, whereas The Chrisleys: Back To Reality blends together documentary and reality forms.

This explains why Daniels, who worked on Surviving R Kelly and The Life and Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and oversees Bunim/Murray’s doc side, was teamed with Farnaz Farjam, who has worked on reality series including Keeping Up With The Kardashians, The Simple Life and Lindsay Lohan’s Beach Club.

“From the outside looking in, Chrisley Knows Best was a very successful series that leaned more towards a sitcom-style. For us, we wanted to show more of an authentic look at what they were going through. Part of that is we broke the fourth wall often, you’d hear us talking to them. The texture of the series, the fabric of the series, feels a lot different than what fans are used to,” said Daniels. “We knew that we wanted to document them where they were in their lives today. That’s that reality element. At the same time, we knew we had to catch everybody up to what has happened since they’ve been off the air. That was the more investigative documentary element.”