Dog is joined by his wife and business partner, Beth Smith Chapman, his children Leland Chapman, Duane Lee Chapman, and "Baby" Lyssa Chapman-Galanti. In season one, the team was joined by Dog's nephew Justin Bihag. Dog's brother Tim "Youngblood" Chapman starred in seasons one to four and made brief appearances in season six; he retired from bounty hunting after season four. Dog refers to Tim as his blood brother. Episodes have been filmed in Hawaii, Dog's home state of Colorado, and the city of San Francisco.
The program spun off from Chapman's appearance in the show Take This Job, a program about people with unusual occupations. Both shows are produced for A&E by Hybrid Films, a New York-based production company. The concept of the program was to follow a family of bounty hunters as they capture fugitives. The television show follows the family's adventures in bounty hunting, Da kine Bail Bonds, which has locations in Oahu, in Kona on the Big Island and also on the mainland in Denver, Colorado.
The television series led to a 2007 autobiographical book You Can Run But You Can't Hide chronicles his years before becoming a bounty hunter and also some of his more infamous hunts including the more controversial hunt that took him and his team to Mexico to capture serial rapist Andrew Luster.[1]
Production of and airing of the show was halted by A&E on November 2, 2007, after Dog Chapman was recorded uttering racial slurs. Chapman publicly repented and vowed to make amends, and received support from fans and leaders of the African-American community. On February 19, 2008, A&E annonunced that the show would return.[2] Reruns of Dog the Bounty Hunter, along with never before seen episodes from season 4, began airing on June 25, 2008. New episodes (the show's fifth season) began airing on July 16, 2008 and Season 6 started in February 2009. The seventh season of Dog the Bounty Hunter began airing on A&E December 2, 2009. The 8th season began March 10, 2010 on A&
