The Hunting Party Premiere Recap: Will You Keep Following NBC’s Prison Break Drama?
NBC this Sunday night let loose The Hunting Party, a high-concept procedural about a small team of investigators who are assembled to “capture the most dangerous killers our country has ever seen” — all of whom have just escaped from a top-secret prison that’s not supposed to exist.
You might also know it as “the TV show that blew up the most interesting thing about it in the first three minutes.”
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That thing would be The Pit — not to be confused with Max’s The Pitt — the aforementioned top-secret (and pretty cool-looking!) prison situated within an old nuclear missile silo in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Because the prison is an underground silo, and because the show stars Manifest, La Brea and Flash alums, here I am to recap the premiere.
After The Pit blows up (something about “a gas buildup in the main cooling system”), former FBI profiler Rebecca “Bex” Henderson (played by Manifest‘s Melissa Roxburgh) is pulled off her shift working security at a casino to get debriefed on the prison — and the escape of at least one of its serial killer inmates, Richard Harris (played not by Walton Goggins). We learn that Bex put Harris away in her first case as a profiler, and thought him to have been executed. But à la the TV series Alcatraz, that’s not what happened. Not at all. Rather, death row serial killers like Harris are sent to The Pit to be… studied? Experimented on? Much is teased.
The daughter of a sheriff, Bex comes with backstory or two. As she shares with Shane Florence (La Brea‘s Josh McKenzie), a Pit prison guard who — along with Patrick Sabongui’s (The Flash) CIA agent Jacob Hassani — is part of her search team, she discovered her ability to profile at age 15, when she came to realize that her best friend’s dad was responsible for killing 12 local girls.
There’s also the matter of her split with the FBI, which came in the wake of a case she worked with partner Oliver Odell (Revenge‘s Nick Wechsler). As seen in flashback, they were pressed to locate a missing girl before it’s too late, so with Bex’s back basically turned, Oliver brutally interrogated a suspect in a barn, and then set the man on fire, horrifying Bex. Bex in turn adopted the found girl, who’s now in college.
What became of line-crossing Oliver? Funny you should ask! It turns out that “after what happened” that night at the barn, he was recruited — to be the warden at The Pit.
“And right now, I need someone I can trust, someone who can help catch the inmates who made it out alive,” he dramatically tells Bex from a hospital bed. “There are more [escapees] than they are willing to admit, and they will do anything to cover up what really happened.”
Meaning…?
“The blast that collapsed The Pit was no accident,” Oliver shares. “It was a jailbreak. Someone wanted those killers back out in the world.”
The Hunting Party will repeat its premiere in its regular time slot on Monday, Feb. 3, at 10/9c, followed by Episode 2 on Feb. 10.
Want scoop on The Hunting Party, or for any other TV show ? Shoot an email to [email protected], and your question may be answered via Matt’s Inside Line!
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