Parole Diaries: When It Comes To Judging Strangers, The Stakes Have Never Been Higher

What's Parole Diaries? It's probably exactly what you'd guess: an unscripted series about the lives of Indianapolis parole officers and their troubled clients.

Where/When? TVOne, Wednesdays at 10 PM ET/PT. (That's why I'm telling you now -- so you can set your DVR to record it tomorrow.)

And I need to watch it, it sounds like: It's pretty remarkable. In the latest episode, the viewer gets a legitimately warm feeling when client Terry -- who has eleven children, none of whom are still in her custody, due to multiple drug-related convictions -- tells Denise, her parole officer, that she never could have landed an imminent job interview were it not for Denise: Terry wants to make Denise proud, and Denise really is. Buuuuuut, then there's Robert, who looks like a gigantic creep even before you find out he's a child molester. Fortunately, he screws up, and his PO, Gerald, violates his parole. Bye, Robert! No more four-hour "innocent jogs" around the neighbourhood for you.

Overall, though, how will it make me feel? What's the ratio of life-affirming to icky? Honestly, the nice moments are genuinely nice, but even when the clients screw up, you get the sense that the POs honestly tried their best to help them and to give them as much leeway as is reasonable when one is dealing with convicted criminals, so that side of it is kind of life-affirming too. Let's call it 70/30.

Do you know one other person who's seen the show? I hadn't even heard of it until they showed a clip of it on The Soup. But! It was the Clip Of The Week, and rightly so.

If my TV schedule is completely full, what could I drop in order to add this? Intervention. On that show, you never really get much of a sense of what actually happens after rehab, whereas Parole Diaries takes you through the stories of people sometimes as much as three or four years into their time in the system. All of life's rich pageant is presented for your edification.