The Hunting Party “Richard Harris”
Created and written by JJ Bailey
Directed by Thor Freudenthal
Airs Mondays on NBC
Though NBC’s drama strategy has mostly shifted to Law & Order spinoffs and anything with the name Chicago in the title, it previously was home to some of the weirder, longshot attempts for high-concept dramas. Most of these – The Event, Revolution, The Cape, The Player, Emerald City… just to name but a few – have been misfires, but it’s also led to some of the more niche cult hits of the past decade, led by the perpetually underrated Hannibal, Grimm, The Blacklist, the Quantum Leap reboot that was better than it had any right to be, and Blindspot (which somehow ran for FIVE seasons? The 2010s were wild).
The Hunting Party, NBC’s new serial killer drama from Echo writer JJ Bailey, is definitely a show that falls under this umbrella – and though its first episode is not nearly weird enough, there are hints and whispers of a truly batshit crazy series, something akin to Prison Break meets Alias (and if we’re really lucky, potentially a shade or two of Hannibal in there). Like Paradise, The Hunting Party is two premises shoved into each other, littered with flashbacks to help fill in the gaps of its story (though decidedly less so here than the Hulu series); The Hunting Party features both a down-on-her-luck FBI profiler hunting down violent criminals, and also a massive conspiracy that involves a hidden underground prison in Wyoming, the CIA, and a bunch of serial killers subjected to extremely Vague and Dangerous medical testing.
I only wish “Richard Harris” appreciated how absolutely unhinged its premise is; unfortunately, The Hunting Party‘s first episode adheres very closely to genre template in its first hour to let any of that insanity really leech to the surface. After its explosive, curious opening sequence (featuring the destruction of the aforementioned secret prison), The Hunting Party spends most of its first hour squarely focused on disgraced profiler Bex Henderson, brought off the sidelines to help find a notorious serial killer escapee she once captured. This is perhaps the pilot’s biggest error; frontloading Bex’s backstory doesn’t do a lot to add texture to her character, thanks in part to some specious writing, and also due to a uneven performance from Melissa Roxburgh, whose attempts to harden Bex’s exterior mostly manifest in some odd facial mannerisms, flattening her character rather than giving us a real opportunity to see why she was such a talented prodigy (before her “downfall”, when her FBI partner lit a suspect on fire).
Her character’s introduction, tied up in an investigation to find the titular Richard Harris, is a thoroughly miscalibrated way to bring us into this show’s weird mix of genres – and potential to really access the thriller genre, in ways NBC’s done impressive work with before (again – motherfuckin’ Hannibal). Everything going on around her is infinitely more interesting, from the predictably shady CIA agent Ryan (Patrick Sabongui) to whatever the obviously nonsensical plot at the heart of the series is – which again, involves the government drugging serial killers they purportedly executed to prevent future Ted Bundys. Centering it on a protagonist as clueless as us makes sense; but the milquetoast-ness of her character limits the show’s ability to really engage with the rhythms of its own story, which makes for a really uneven first investigation.
It’s not really until the last ten minutes that The Hunting Party lets the audience see just how unhinged it could become, revealing that Harris’s last “victim” was not actually a victim, but an enthusiastic accomplice in all his crimes (who then gets put into a shipping container on a boat? What kind of legal processes do they have in this world?), and then showing us that Bex’s former partner was the warden of the super serial killer experiment prison (oh yeah, and Bex adopted the daughter of the first killer she ever caught, another truly batshit insane plot line that isn’t touched upon here). It is as ridiculous as it sounds, and there are moments you can almost feel “Richard Harris” trying to lean further into those, only to be pulled back into Typical Pilot territory, where it adheres to the conventional pacing and bread crumb storytelling some of NBC’s lesser forays into genre drama have unfortunately excelled at.
In its current state, The Hunting Party is too leaden to be fun, and too predictable to really be shocking or exciting; but it’s less a matter of having incongruent pieces, than a series that just needs to recalibrate its tone and storytelling approach. There is something here, and whether The Hunting Party will tap into it as it tweaks its episodic formula remains to be seen; it certainly has a higher ceiling than I expected, in ways I couldn’t have predicted after seeing the episode’s first ten minutes. Whether that spark turns into something will be something to watch in coming weeks (especially with a second episode penned by former Legends of Tomorrow showrunner Keto Shimizu) – based on the simplistic, sterilized pilot, that may be unlikely, but I’ll be tuning in to see if it can figure itself out.