PRETEND On Screen
PRETEND's reporting has gone beyond the podcast feed and onto television.
Netflix — "Don't Pick Up the Phone" (2022)
Javier Leiva's reporting on the "strip search phone call scam" — the decade-long wave of hoax calls impersonating police officers that talked fast-food managers into strip-searching employees — became part of Netflix's 2022 docuseries Don't Pick Up the Phone. Javier Leiva first covered the case on PRETEND in October 2019; production company WAG Entertainment contacted him after seeing that reporting and brought him on to help piece the story together, interviewing him on camera for roughly five hours (Raleigh Magazine).
Discovery+ — "Citizen P.I." (2021)
Javier Leiva is featured in Citizen P.I., a six-episode Discovery+ series that premiered July 27, 2021, profiling amateur investigators who have played major roles in cracking real cases. The series isn't a direct adaptation of a single PRETEND season — it profiles Javier Leiva himself as one of the featured citizen investigators.