A brawny white man in prison blues stands alone, facing the panel that will decide whether to grant his parole. He apologizes to his robbery victim and pleads his case for release, but his request for parole is denied. Then his attorney offers another route out of prison: an inmate “fire camp” program run by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire). “Cal Fire is hungry for inmates like you,” she says. The CBS TV drama Fire Country follows Bode Donovan as he joins the ranks of incarcerated workers who fight California’s wildfires.

Bode’s lawyer is right: Cal Fire has developed an appetite for cheap and exploited workers. In a budget request earlier this year, the department finally admitted that incarcerated workers had made up 192 of 208 hand crews directed by Cal Fire, confirming a long-held suspicion that incarcerated crews carried out the majority of the manual labor for the state’s wildfire response.

Each year, thousands of incarcerated workers put in millions of hours of work for Cal Fire with minimal compensation. Fire Country offers us a glimpse into that reality. The series features a predictable dose of unrealistic Hollywood melodrama, but it also gets many things right — particularly the working conditions that put firefighters, and indeed all California residents, at greater risk. What Cal Fire calls an extreme labor shortage is actually the result of a reliance on incarcerated workers for the past several decades. Now the situation is growing untenable: the department’s workforce is unable to keep up with worsening fire seasons caused by climate change, much less forestall future destruction.