The Hunting Party

The Echo Chamber of "The Pit"

I have a real weakness for absurd TV premises. Tell me there’s a secret underground government prison in Wyoming where legally dead serial killers are kept for shady psychological observation until an explosion lets them loose, and I’m already on the couch. That’s the setup for *The Hunting Party*, JJ Bailey’s NBC procedural, and it sounds gloriously unwell. The kind of pitch someone blurts out at 1 a.m. with too much coffee in their system. Somehow, between that idea and the actual series, all the electricity leaked out.



We’ve had so much serial killer media at this point that the genre feels scavenged clean. Bailey and co-showrunner Jake Coburn seem to know that, which is probably why they bolted a huge government-conspiracy engine onto a standard case-of-the-week chassis. It’s a big swing structurally. You can practically picture the whiteboard in the writers’ room. The trouble is, the show doesn’t trust anyone watching it. The pilot is less an episode than a guided lecture. Nobody talks like a person. They just read out each other’s biographies.

Max Gao at *The A.V. Club* called it a show that "never emerges as anything more than a derivative take on a well-trodden genre," and if anything I found it more aggravating than that. It keeps hinting at bigger questions about black sites, psychology, state violence, and institutional rot, then instantly drops them the second somebody has to sprint through a warehouse after a boilerplate killer.



Look at the pilot’s opening. The blast that tears apart “The Pit” should feel primal and terrifying. Instead, the camera glides through the corridors with a kind of antiseptic elegance, every hallway washed in the same flat blue-gray network sheen. When the prisoners spill out into the night, the mud, the concrete, the whole environment feels weirdly touchless. Nothing has texture. I honestly can’t tell whether that sterile look is meant to make the facility feel otherworldly or if it’s just what happens when the schedule is too tight. Either way, the tension is dead on arrival.

Then there’s the lead. Melissa Roxburgh plays Rebecca “Bex” Henderson, an ex-FBI profiler who naturally left the bureau after a traumatic case and is now doing casino security. Roxburgh spent years on *Manifest*, where she got very good at delivering ludicrous plot turns with a straight face, and that steadiness helps here. But watch how she moves. Her shoulders are up, locked, defensive. Her eyes dart around not like someone reading a room but like someone trying to survive the next slab of exposition. Instead of a brilliant profiler, she often feels like a person bracing for the script.



The supporting cast grabs whatever air it can. Patrick Sabongui gives CIA agent Jacob Hassani a dry bureaucratic menace that sometimes cuts through, and Josh McKenzie finds a bruised sincerity in former prison guard Shane Florence that belongs to a stronger show. But the writing keeps snapping them back into prefab parts. Stoic military man. Murky intelligence operative. Broken genius. I’ve met all these people before, just under different logos.

Whether *The Hunting Party* works for you probably comes down to how much comfort you find in recycled beats. There is a kind of reliability to a procedural this locked into its rhythms. You know when the ad break is coming. You know when the killer will slip out the back just as the team hits the front. But a premise this deranged needed an execution with some nerve. Instead of leading us somewhere dark and strange, the show just floods the room with fluorescent light.