• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, April 1, 2025

What happens when a man is handpicked by a telemarketer for the devil to become a bounty hunter for escapees from hell?

That’s the elevator pitch for “The Bondsman,” premiering Thursday on Amazon Prime with Kevin Bacon in the title role.

While watching the 30-minute premiere episode on Monday (mercifully, all eight of the show’s episodes are a half-hour), I wondered where I had seen something like this before.

The answer was that I had seen this show, or many pieces of it, in many places and in many guises. 

Most notably, I was pretty certain that I had already seen a TV show about a bounty hunter for Satan who rounded up escaped, condemned souls in order to return them to the gates of hell. 

The show was called “Reaper,” and it aired on The CW from 2007 to 2009. When I went on Google to confirm this, I found another one also -- “Brimstone,” which ran on Fox for a brief time during the 1998-99 season. 

Both of those shows covered the same ground as “The Bondsman,” only they were less gory. 

I also realized that “The Bondsman” was like “Men In Black,” except that the Bacon character pursues escapees from hell, not mischievous extraterrestrials. 

As for bounty hunters in general, they have long been a staple of movies and TV shows, most notably Westerns.

But “The Bondsman” is no Western. Instead, it is based in rural Georgia, where a local crime chieftain runs a popular nightspot. 

Before you can say “Walking Tall” (referring to the Joe Don Baker original, of course) and/or “Road House” (the Patrick Swayze four-star classic), the Kevin Bacon bondsman character is locking horns with the country crime boss right from the get-go. The reason? The crime boss is making time with Hub’s ex-wife!

Throughout the premiere episode of “The Bondsman,” Hub’s cell phones and landlines will not stop ringing with the exhortations of a telemarketing company called Pot O’ Gold.

This turns out to be the agents of the Devil trying to get in touch with Hub in order to put him to work recapturing Satan’s runaways. 

Why pick on him? Because, we soon learn, he is already dead -- “murdered” (in quotes) in the very first scene of Episode One. 

Ordinarily, he would have just gone straight to hell himself, but since he worked his whole life as a bounty hunter -- and a reasonably clever one at that -- he is offered a deal under which he need not report to hell at all if he simply agrees to put his skill set to work for Satan.

Being a dead bounty hunter ain’t much of a living (to paraphrase Clint Eastwood from the bounty hunter movie “The Outlaw Josey Wales), but if you’re a dead bondsman with unfinished business at a criminal roadhouse, then it’s better than spending an eternity in hell.

“The Bondsman” premieres on Thursday, April 3, on Amazon Prime.