{alltv} 'Sopranos' star hosts real-crime series

It's alarming what some people will do for money.

"And for not lots of money, either," said Steve Schirripa, host of the new real-crime series Nothing Personal.

"Not life-changing money. "It seems to me that the one thread in all six of the stories we did is money, of course. That's what I see. It's just amazing to me."

Nothing Personal, which focuses on true stories of contract killers, makes its Canadian debut Wednesday, July 13 on the cable channel Investigation Discovery (ID).

For anyone who was a fan of The Sopranos, you'll recognize Schirripa for his portrayal of Bobby Baccalieri.

Schirripa is the host and co-executive producer of Nothing Personal, which is a Canadian series from Cineflix that already aired in the United States earlier this year.

The first season consists of six episodes, and Schirripa said the show already has been picked up for a second season.

"Unfortunately, there are a lot of these stories to tell," Schirripa said. "You never run out."

Schirripa wants to be clear about one thing, however: Even though the first episode of Nothing Personal tells the tale of a mobster killing another mobster, the main thrust of the series is not mob-related, per se.

Most of the episodes deal with outwardly normal people who get themselves into bizarre situations and wind up hiring hit men in misguided attempts to make their problems go away.

"The first episode, I'm from that neighbourhood (in New York) where Larry Carrozza was killed, I lived not far from there at all," Schirripa said. "So that one was a little familiar to me. The rest of these stories, I had no idea.

"The second episode, Green Widow, is about a woman who hired a hit man to kill her husband, and then hired a hit man to kill the hit man. They're fascinating stories."

Post-Sopranos, Schirripa has had a regular role for the past four years on The Secret Life of the American Teenager, which currently airs Mondays on MuchMusic. He's glad to be playing a "normal dad" on that show, as opposed to a gangster.

"The Sopranos was the greatest thing that ever happened, but I knew it was going to end some day," Schirripa said. "I had written some books and I kind of never stopped working on other things.

"But after The Sopranos, all they want to do is offer you bad mob movies, really bad. It never will be done as good as The Sopranos. So I've been trying to get away from that stuff."

Nonetheless, Schirripa admitted to being a bit of a true-crime buff, which led to his involvement with Nothing Personal.

"I love all the true crime shows and I don't watch much TV except for Dateline and 48 Hours and stuff like that," Schirripa said. "So I was talking to Cineflix and they had this idea, we pitched it and they bought it.

"We have some of the families on camera as well, so we're not glorifying this by any means. We're just telling the stories, and some of them are hard to believe."