Summary
The Hunting Party squanders the potential of an excellent premise in Episode 1, devolving into a by-the-book procedural.
NBC’s The Hunting Party has one of the more compelling concepts in recent memory. It’s about a top-secret subterranean prison built below a nuclear missile silo housing the deadliest serial killers humanity has ever produced, many of whom are supposed to be dead. In Episode 1, though, it detonates that premise, allowing an otherwise fairly generic procedural to grow out of the rubble.
Why you’d imagine this prison – dubbed The Pit, for obvious reasons – and then blow it up is anyone’s guess. Most of the background plot revolves around what was really going on there, but I find it difficult to believe that chasing down The Pit’s escapees is more interesting than a similar drama set inside the prison itself would be.
But this is where we are. “Richard Harris”, named after one of the killers who escapes from The Pit after it spontaneously explodes at the start of the premiere, is mostly an A-to-B cat-and-mouse chase wherein a team led by CIA agent Ryan Hassani and comprising former FBI profiler turned casino security expert Rebecca “Bex” Henderson (Melissa Roxburgh, of Manifest fame) and one of The Pit’s former guards, Shane Florence, pursue the titular killer before he can claim any more victims – or reveal the fact that his execution several years prior was faked.
The hunt for Harris isn’t that interesting – he’s a garden-variety nutcase who blinded his victims, who were all women, to force them into experiencing the same terrifying darkness he was consigned to by his abusive mother – but does have an unexpected twist towards the end, when it’s revealed that Harris’s final “victim” was his co-conspirator. But the bulk of the premiere is devoted to establishing the team and teasing out the wider plot and the true nature of The Pit.
Bex, for instance, helped to put Harris away, but left the Bureau after a case with her mentor, Oliver Odell, turned unexpectedly murderous. Desperate to find a little girl before she froze to death, Odell crossed a line by setting a suspect on fire. Bex found the child – and subsequently adopted her; she’s now in college – but couldn’t square her colleague’s behavior with her principles.
A still from The Hunting Party | Image via NBC
As luck would have it, the end of The Hunting Party Episode 1 reveals that Odell was recruited as the warden of The Pit, and he specifically requested Bex’s involvement because he needs someone he can trust – as it turns out, the explosion that destroyed the prison was a deliberate jailbreak designed to free all of the prisoners for reasons as-yet unknown.
This will likely put Bex even more at odds with Hassani, a spook who is determined to keep the true nature of The Pit secret and is willing to kill to do so – he splatters Harris’s head all over the walls before he can reveal anything about what the prisoners in The Pit were subjected to. It’s implied that the inmates were being used for illegal experimentation. At one point in the premiere, Hassani vaguely describes the work as being devoted to apprehending serial killers before they become serial killers by studying the inmates. It’s easy to imagine what that process looked like.
It’s all compelling enough, especially with the last-minute suggestion that the destruction of the facility was intentional. But who’d want notorious killers back out in the world? It’d have to be someone with enough high-level access to know The Pit exists, and enough resources to blow the whole place up, which you’d think would narrow the suspect pool significantly. But there are no candidates yet.
My worry with The Hunting Party is that the individual episodes are going to be less interesting than the overarching narrative, which is certainly the case here in Episode 1. However, that could easily change. You shouldn’t judge a show exclusively by its premiere, so I’ll reserve judgment for now, but here’s to hoping we’re not looking at yet another so-so procedural when the potential is there for it to become much more.
