The Hunting Party: "Richard Harris" (All J Entertainment, Jake Coburn Productions, Universal Television, NBC-TV, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, February 6) I put on NBC at 8 p.m. thinking there’d be another Law and Order episode. Instead they showed the premiere of a new series called The Hunting Party, which begins with an explosion inside a converted missile silo in Wyoming that was rebuilt as a prison called “The Pit.” “The Pit” was set up by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to operate secretly and do non-consensual research on the brains and psyches of serial killers to determine how they function and if there’s a way to turn off whatever mental quirks turn people into serial killers before they actually become so far gone that they start killing people. Only the explosion, while it kills most of the prisoners as well as much of the staff, allows some of the nastiest and most evil serial killers to escape. The central character is Rebecca “Bex” Henderson (Melissa Roxburgh), a semi-retired female FBI agent who’s working as a pit boss at a Florida casino when she’s suddenly summoned off the casino floor by a team of mystery agents, one of whom is a White House advisor who reports directly to the President himself. She’s told that the dastardly serial killer Richard Harris (Tobias Jellinek), whom she had previously caught as the junior partner of a fellow FBI agent and had been led to believe had been executed. Instead his sentence was secretly commuted to life without parole and he was put in “The Pit,” where he was subjected to various nasty experiments (not detailed, at least in this pilot episode, by writer J. J. Bailey, who for some reason signs his first name as “Jj,” which irritates me even more than the nomenclature for the current Vice-President, who signs himself “JD Vance”) and waited for his chance to escape. Bex and her current partner, Oliver Odell (Nick Wechsler), trace him to a farmhouse in Colorado where he abducts another woman and hides out in the home of Nicole Westin (Beth Locke).

When Bex finally caught Harris he’d been with Nicole and Bex assumed she was going to be his next victim and he was there to kill her, but it turns out that [spoiler alert!] she’s really Harris’s girlfriend and literally his partner in crime. It also turns out that Bex’s former partner, whom she got disillusioned with when he literally incinerated a witness who had a lead on where the next victim was being hidden but wouldn’t talk until the agent threatened to set him on fire. Once he lit the match, the witness gave up the location, but the agent went ahead and let the fire burn until the man was dead. It turns out Bex’s former partner was reassigned and was the warden of the secret prison, and he survived the explosion and gets to make a long speech about how the ends justify the means and if the criminals aren’t going to play by the rules, the law shouldn’t either. In one respect, The Hunting Party is a good show for the Zeitgeist of the Trump 2.0 administration (though I noticed that when the cops take people into custody on this show, they push them into the squad car gently so as to avoid crashing their heads into the roof of the car – whereas Trump infamously declared during his first Presidential term that they shouldn’t be so solicitous and should just bang their heads against the car roofs), with its idea that any weapon on the side of law enforcement is a good thing and its implicit endorsement of incarcerating people on the basis of what they may do psychologically even if they haven’t actually committed any crimes yet. The idea of diagnosing people with so-called “criminal tendencies” and locking them up before they have a chance to commit actual crimes has long been an idée fixe on the part of many American Rightists even though it flies against the basic principle of Anglo-Saxon-American jurisprudence that you can’t punish people for what they might do at some point in the future, but only for what they’ve already done and you can prove they’ve done beyond a reasonable doubt. I’m not sure I’ll ever watch The Hunting Party again – its regular air time will be at 10 p.m. on Mondays – but I’m glad I saw this first episode even though, as an early imdb.com reviewer wrote, “All in all it’s gonna be a case-of-the-week story, progressed on the thinnest of leads and solved just at the 40th minute with a random clue. Seen it all before.”