I’m overly forgiving of the state of network TV sometimes. I’m also overly forgiving of a serial killer procedural done well, able to find escapist value in the “CSI” and “Criminal Minds” franchises, along with some of their wannabes. And the concept of NBC’s “The Hunting Party” feels like a slam dunk: A bunch of serial killers escape from a top-secret facility, with a new one tracked down every episode. Sign me up!
To say that this show is insulting to the intelligence of everyone unlucky enough to watch it would be an understatement. It is poorly made in every department: writing, directing, performance, whatever you can think of. I’m betting even the catering was bad. It’s so genuinely awful that I started to wonder how different an AI-produced show given the parameters of this project would be. There’s so little personality or human touch to this one that I have to think it wouldn’t be much different. It’s a show produced by algorithms and focus groups, a product with no pulse whatsoever.
Melissa Roxburgh makes for a numbingly boring lead as Rebecca “Bex” Henderson,” a disgraced FBI agent who is brought in for the most important assignment of her life when a place called “The Pit” basically explodes in the show’s opening scenes. It turns out that The Pit was a facility at which the nation’s most notorious serial killers, most presumed dead by law enforcement or lethal injection, were being studied. Imagine if all of history’s deadliest murderers weren’t actually executed but studied to help law enforcement stop future Ted Bundys. Then imagine if most of them escaped, leading people like Bex to track them down, one by one. It’s a great idea for a show, allowing for the writers to play with different “flavors” of serial killers while also dipping their toe in conspiracy theories about what the government is hiding from us in the name of public safety. “Allowing” but not insisting, as the writers strictly refuse to give anything in this show an actual personality.
“The Hunting Party” is a blunt, lifeless affair through the three episodes I could barely manage. Where do I start? How about that none of it looks like it takes place in the real world? There’s no dirt under any fingernails in this “Silence of the Lambs” wannabe, a show that has been sanded down of any conceivable edge or tension. I started to think during another visually flat episode about how this show is on the same network that once broadcast “Hannibal,” a program with more ambition in almost every frame than entire episodes of this dull mess. The cops, the serial killers, the victims—nothing here has a pulse in a show that’s so aggressively generic that it feels produced by a machine.
Could “The Hunting Party” find its voice and develop into the show that its admittedly clever premise allows? I usually hold out hope for writers rooms to find their groove after rocky starts, but there’s absolutely no signs to suggest that will happen here. Everyone involved should start hunting for a better gig.
Three episodes screened for review. Premieres tonight, February 3rd, on NBC.
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