A simple yet bizarre pretext unfolds herein: A month and fifteen days before he's sentenced on a gun charge, T.I. will save seven kids, as part of a court-ordered 1,000 hour community service sentence earlier imposed. Somehow – and don't ask me how, as intricacies of American jurisprudence continue to astound and amaze me – he convinced a judge somewhere to let him do all this on TV.

MTV, to be exact. Right square in front of his target audience.

In other words, as T.I. does community service, he sells albums.

THIS guy's a genius.

Now, it's easy to be cynical, and there's probably a basis for that, but here's a little bit more about the show before you pass judgment. Tonight T.I. takes Pee-Wee , an Atlanta street hustler, on a tour of his own ghosts-of-T.I.'s Christmas past: A cold hard jail cell and a morgue, where a real-life, now real-dead, hustler is laid out in a coffin.

“There are more hustlers dead than hustlers living.” When T.I. says this – pure hyperbole given all the Wall Street hustlers and the sub-prime mortgage market hustlers and … – you'll find yourself nodding in silent agreement. Poor Pee-Wee can barely draw himself up straight to look down at the cold slab before him.

Will T.I. reform Pee-Wee? Will he reform six others who are currently on the road to hell? Will his next album go platinum? (That would be “Paper Trail” and it may already have…)

I don't know the answers to any of this stuff. But I do know that “T.I.'s Road to Redemption” has a raw authenticity that will chill you to the bone.