A new NBC drama series ratchets up TV’s
obsession with serial killers to new heights.
The TV Blog has long noted the proliferation of serial murderers in our prime-time procedurals over the
years.
But on this new NBC series, titled “The Hunting Party,” serial killers are front and center -- with a new
one on the run with investigators in hot pursuit each week.
The explosion in the TV population of these cruel and unusual psychopaths has challenged scriptwriters
to plumb the depths of their imaginations to make each of these killers more hideous that the last one.
In Episode One of “The Hunting Party,” a
serial killer on the lam named Richard Harris is a kidnaper of young women, who he ties up and then blinds by injecting some kind of ammonia solution into their eyes. Eventually, he kills
them.
advertisement
advertisement
If that paragraph was disturbing to read, then please know it was just as disturbing to write. But this is what is on TV.
Taking the serial killer theme even further, Harris is one of a multitude of escapees from a super-maximum, high-tech, underground federal prison in a Wyoming
wasteland.
The top-secret prison shares its space with a nuclear missile silo. And when the facility explodes following some kind of electrical failure,
Harris and the others are scattered to the four winds.
A team of three is then selected to go and retrieve them dead or alive. Yes, only three, which does
not seem like a very sensible way to chase serial killers around the vastness of the American West.
In any case, one of them is a wunderkind FBI profiler named Rebecca
(played by Melissa Roxburgh, above photo) who is this show’s Clarice, only this time she is on the trail of multiple Hannibal Lecters.
The show had a premiere
on Sunday, January 19, following the Eagles-Rams playoff game that the Eagles happily won 28-22.
The episode
gets repeated when the show assumes its regular time period next Monday at 10 p.m. Eastern on NBC.
Like so many others of our serial killer-dependent TV
shows, “The Hunting Party” is nothing if not proficient in the elements of its production.
This prison-in-a-missile-silo scenario is as farfetched as they come,
but credit the show’s producers for putting it across anyway.
However, while I know nothing of police procedures except for what I see on TV, sometimes the
tactics they use in “The Hunting Party” were head-scratchers.
In Episode One, for example, the trio lies in wait inside a darkened house for
their serial-killer target to appear.
At one point, he is so clearly silhouetted outside a window that
taking him out with one shot would be just about the easiest thing imaginable.
But no one takes a shot at
him, which leaves him with an opportunity to make even more mayhem a few moments later.
Proficient or not, this show and all the others like it about serial
killers who immobilize, torture and then murder their helpless victims comprise a dark, grim corner of the TV universe that for some reason or another, viewers don’t mind revisiting.