NBC’s The Hunting Party is a derivative take on a well-trodden genre
The far-fetched crime drama follows agents searching for “the most dangerous and violent criminals the world has ever known.”
Photo: David Astorga/NBC
As far as hard-to-swallow premises go, The Hunting Party may require the biggest suspension of disbelief of any new broadcast drama this season. While the NBC crime series—which debuts its second episode February 10 following last month’s premiere after the Eagles-Rams game—clearly intends to raise larger moral questions about government control and unethical human experimentation, the project, at least in the four episodes sent to critics for review, never emerges as anything more than a derivative take on a well-trodden genre.
Created by JJ Bailey, who showruns with Jake Coburn (of the similarly unimaginative, recent one-and-done NBC crime drama The Endgame), The Hunting Party centers on a small team of investigators who are tasked with tracking down an indeterminate number of escaped serial killers in the wake of an explosion at “The Pit,” a top-secret, high-tech, subterranean prison in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Chief among this group of investigators is Rebecca “Bex” Henderson (Manifest’s Melissa Roxburgh), an ex-FBI profiler who, in the early minutes of the pilot, is seen working security at a casino in Portsmouth, Virginia. Suddenly, federal agents walk into the place, and Bex realizes they’re there to save her from the monotony of catching people who cheat at card tables. After a quick flight, she soon meets the Attorney General (played by Zabryna Guevara) and by-the-books CIA agent Jacob Hassani (Patrick Sabongui), who want her to re-profile Richard Harris, the serial killer she helped nab with her former partner Oliver Odell (Nick Wechsler) years ago.
Harris was supposedly killed by lethal injection, but Bex quickly learns that he was just one of many death-row inmates whose executions were faked and who were then transferred to The Pit, where, under the guise of treatment for their mental illnesses, they became the unwitting subjects of scientific experiments. And of course, Harris was naturally the first of many dangerous criminals who broke out of the prison as soon as it burned to the ground. So Bex teams up with Jacob and former Pit prison guard and soldier Shane Florence (Josh McKenzie) to chase after Harris before he claims his next victim.
Phew. The premise of The Hunting Party—searching for serial killers whose ill-advised treatments have rendered them even more vicious—is intriguing in theory, but the writers have somehow chosen the dullest possible execution of that vision. Any early promise, as well as insight into criminal psychology that could have been in Bailey’s pitch, has quickly gone up in flames like The Pit itself. Over these episodes, the characters are unremarkable at best and ill-defined at worst. They each have their own secrets and “dark pasts,” but the show gives viewers little reason to buy into their stories or, frankly, even care about their fates or the larger mystery surrounding what really happened at The Pit.