Given a choice, no one would ever prefer to reside near a supermax prison. However, when it comes to narrative plots, such locations often serve as favorites for broadcast television.
The reason is not difficult to comprehend. A typical supermax prison, or any prison for that matter, crammed with the worst criminals, provides a treasure trove of procedural plotlines waiting to unfold.
The Bottom Line
Simply put, “not in my backyard” applies aptly to this prison flop.
Preview airdate: Sunday, January 19 (NBC)
Regular premiere: 10 p.m. Monday, February 3 (NBC)
Cast: Melissa Roxburgh, Nick Wechsler, Patrick Sabongui, Josh McKenzie and Sara Garcia
Creator: JJ Bailey
Such prison settings have been the crux of many shows including Prison Break and the third season of Heroes, along with a short-lived Alcatraz and almost every Batman story linked to Arkham Asylum. With a few tweaks and turns, it has been the root of several of NBC’s most successful shows of the 2010s, including The Blacklist and Blindspot. These shows lured viewers in with the promise of a weekly string of the worst villains imaginable, all linked through an eccentric man with a hat or a mysterious woman with tattoos.
This format is advantageous as it instantly provides a lineup of villains ready to be caught, ideally by an ingeniously assembled team of protagonists. It’s a framework that can be fleshed out in various innovative ways.
However, then there’s NBC’s The Hunting Party, a show that is as unimaginative and stripped down a take on this genre as one could possibly witness. Using a supermax setting as a backdrop, it essentially ends up being a less realistic, less interesting version of Criminal Minds. It’s easy to envision viewers tuning in for The Hunting Party, partly due to NBC’s sneak preview after the NFL playoffs and partly due to the insatiable audience appetite for serial killer tropes. But, unfortunately, nothing specific in The Hunting Party is likely to contribute to that viewership.
Spanning four episodes, this turns out to be bland and generic television, the kind of stuff that is either overlooked during summer burn-offs or, even more frequently, never makes it beyond the pilot stage.
The show, created by JJ Bailey, begins in a remote (presumably Wyoming, but it could be anywhere) and somewhat mysterious underground prison. The prison appears to be designed by someone who once heard about Jeremy Bentham’s concept of the Panopticon, but didn’t bother to research it. It’s full of the worst and creepiest serial killers and similar characters — I would say “men,” but that’s only 98% accurate — who are generally believed to have been executed, only … they haven’t been. In the first scene, we witness an impending explosion of some sort. It doesn’t look promising.
An unspecified number of prisoners escape. If one is broadcasting on television, the number should always be “100,” based on an obsolete syndicated model that means nothing to today’s television economy. But it’s always better to tell the audience you have 100 episodes up your sleeve.
This escape leads to the recruitment of Melissa Roxburgh‘s character, Bex Henderson, who speaks solely in profiler jargon and is constantly touted as the most brilliant profiler anybody ever saw or knew. However, she’s now working in security at a casino in Portsmouth, Virginia. Why Portsmouth, Virginia? It doesn’t matter! She used to be in the FBI and now she isn’t, and through four episodes the show sends mixed signals about why she isn’t in the FBI anymore. But honestly, again … does it matter?
Bex is called upon by Jacob Hassani (Patrick Sabongui), a CIA agent who knows more than he’s letting on, about the clandestine prison that has just gone up in smoke. The first prisoner they’re looking for, a serial killer named Richard Harris, just happens to be a killer Bex apprehended in her very first case — a case she worked on with her then-partner/mentor Oliver Odell (Nick Wechsler), who we initially see only in flashbacks, but then in the present as well.
Joining the team is Shane Florence (Josh McKenzie), a former guard at the facility, which is known only as The Pit. This should not be confused with Max’s new medical drama, The Pitt, which is far superior. Eventually, Sara Garcia’s Jennifer Morales, an Army intelligence officer, joins the group, but so far, she adds absolutely nothing.
NBC is promoting The Hunting Party as a “high-concept thriller,” but it’s more accurately a “no-concept no-thriller.”
In simple terms, the show lacks a hook. If there was something that made NBC executives say, “This would be a cool thing to do,” it got eroded away in the development process, leaving no trace.
The Pit is neither an interesting concept nor, over the course of four episodes, a logical one. What these killers were doing there, what was being done to them, never even begins to pique intellectual recognition or curiosity. Around the third episode, it became clear to me that the experimental treatments given to the killers were supposed to be part of a hook, but anything intriguing about those insights into criminal psychology is lost. I had a paragraph about why the premise is actively unrealistic, but that’s so far down the list of the show’s problems that I’m not going to bother.
Once the killers manage to escape from the ruins of The Pit in an orderly weekly fashion and make it into the outside world, their actions become even less compelling and even less logical. This leads to episodic storylines devoid of any suspense or mystery, filmed with a dreary, washed-out dullness that never changes.
And the characters are far from being a hook either.
Bex, just another in a line of Clarice Starling-like investigators whose brilliance stems from ordinary trauma, has a dark secret. Oliver has a dark secret. Shane has a dark secret. Jacob has dark secrets. Everybody has dark secrets and yet none of the dark secrets are interesting, at least not so far. No character in The Hunting Party has a unique voice or personality, and once they start interacting, none of the relationships has any dynamic or chemistry.
Therefore, it’s not surprising that none of the actors portraying these uninteresting characters are particularly interesting or are given anything interesting to do. Bex is at least intolerable in the way that television’s all-knowing, all-seeing profilers often are. She has a connection to a supporting character whose identity is supposed to be slightly surprising, so I won’t spoil it except to say that the relationship should be humanizing, but isn’t (a statement that could also be applied to other relationships from Bex’s past that aren’t at all humanizing in the present).
If the show lacks a hook for the network or for viewers, it feels similarly confounding for the casting team. How do you have four episodes featuring four of the most notorious serial killers in history, or some such nonsense, without generating a single memorable performance from a single memorable guest star? That, if nothing else, is an achievement.
The fourth episode, which feels like a season finale even though it isn’t, is the only one in which anything actually happens to suggest a mythology or series progression here. I assure you that I will never find out if any of the breadcrumbs in that fourth episode amount to anything.
Credit: www.hollywoodreporter.com
