'What's with all this stalking through the tall grass business? It's not like we're hunting lions.' Photos: Handout
Cast your mind (or streaming platform of choice) back 50 years or so, Traveller ... to a time before Hannibal Lecter "glamorised" on-screen serial killers, before Mindhunters and Criminal Minds, when law enforcement preferred a more direct and final solution to such habitual miscreants.
Some would argue that Clint Eastwood's "Dirty" Harry Callahan had the right idea in dealing with his debut movie's central villain, Andy Robinson's serial killer Scorpio.
But the times have changed. Boy, have they.
Serial killers have rights, too (but Harry, bless him, would still be "all broken up" over violating those rights), and the general leaning in mass entertainment is to show them incarcerated, their minds studied, all in the hope of nipping the genesis of other potential murderers in the bud.
The Hunting Party, a procedural drama that just finished its first season on AXN (fret not, it's likely to be rerun ad infinitum, or you can still catch it on demand, and Season Two is set to debut next month in the United States), takes this endeavour many steps further.
Instead of housing a serial killer or two in some isolated wing of a maximum security prison, some shadowy types here have built a huge underground prison known as The Pit to house dozens (possibly hundreds) of killers to study, learn from, and (possibly) rehabilitate.
To quote Dr Ian Malcolm in the first Jurassic Park sequel, this is possibly the worst idea in the history of bad ideas.
This portion of today's show is brought to you by the letters H, for Hannibal, and W, for wannabe.
True enough, the first episode is barely five minutes in when a massive blast destroys The Pit, no doubt killing some of its occupants but setting enough of them free to set up a "monster of the week" structure for the show.
That alone would not be enough to set The Hunting Party apart from the rest of the pack. No, we need something that taps right into the conspiracy-addled zeitgeist, and that is a Sinister Motive behind the architects of The Pit.
The series is the brainchild of, and first full-blown series by, writer/producer JJ Bailey, whose earlier unsold pilots Echo (not the MCU show) and Getaway (not the Steven McQueen classic) sound pretty good on paper.
The titular pack comprises FBI profiler Rebecca "Bex" Henderson (Melissa Roxburgh, Manifest); former Pit co-boss and Bex's ex Oliver Odell (Nick Wechsler, Roswell, Revenge); CIA agent Ryan Hassani (Patrick Sabongui, The Flash); ex-Pit guard Shane Florence (Josh McKenzie, La Brea); and Army Intelligence officer Jennifer Morales (Sara Garcia, The Flash), the team's "girl in the chair".
Expect the customary suspicions, hidden agendas, past traumas and dark secrets to crop up and occasionally get in the way of the party's hunting, though things typically get neatly tied up by the end of each instalment.
At least, where the monster of the week is concerned.
In the meantime, the conspiracy expands and unravels as we progress, with related "secret facilities" being revealed, as more players drift into the picture – US Attorney General Mallory (Zabryna Guevara, Gotham) and Oliver's boss Colonel Lazarus (Kari Matchett, Covert Affairs) among them.
By the ninth of the first season's 10 episodes, Big Reveals have yet to take place – undoubtedly, those will come in Episode 10, which I'll only get to watch after writing this – but the few threads we get to pull on have been intriguing so far and help elevate the show past the bog-standard level of the weekly cases.
'Here I am ... back in the tall grass again.'
While The Hunting Party has been watchable and decently crafted so far, its escaped killers have been garden variety so far for viewers jaded by hundreds of episodes of Criminal Minds, Dexter, Hannibal and their ilk. Not to mention the true-life monsters being given far too much airtime (IMHO) by far too many studios, networks and streamers.
And honestly, I can't wrap my head around all this fuss about studying the minds and methodologies of serial killers when the best, ultimate "last word" (on screen at least) on their compulsions was delivered some decades back.
Cast your mind (and streaming platform) back 30 years, Traveller, to classic The X-Files episode Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose. In its closing moments, the crazed killer known as The Puppet demands to know why he does such horrible things.
The simple, bare-bones response from psychic Clyde (the late, great Peter Boyle): "You do what you do ... because you're a homicidal maniac."
Mic drop.
The Hunting Party Season One is available on Astro On Demand.
Summary:
Garden-variety killers in the wild
