I’m going to be perfectly honest: I have no idea if Hunters is a good show. I have watched the five episodes Amazon provided to critics, and I don’t know if this is a series worth watching. It’s a strange place to be in as a critic. What I can say is that there was enough within those five episodes to convince me to finish out the first season when it drops on Friday, February 21. As for whether or not it’s worth your time, I’ll give you a basic rundown of my own thoughts and reactions to a series that I suspect most people will have a hard time classifying.
The series is a strange combination of actual history and an alternative timeline. Set in 1977, Nazis have managed to infiltrate the US government, NASA, and our normal everyday lives; some with the knowledge and backing of the government (Nazi scientists who were recruited for NASA to help win the Space Race – something that really did happen), some deeply undercover. Despite their heinous crimes during the Holocaust, these men and women now live consequence-free in America. Or, at least they do until a eclectic team of Nazi hunters tracks them down and makes them pay for their past atrocities.
Hunters greatest weapon is its cast. Aside from Al Pacino (doing a pretty awful German accent tinged with a hint of his Roy Cohn from Angels in America, Pacino is far more central to the story and series than I anticipated), the series is fleshed out by a murderers’ row of character actors you know and love. Team Nazi Hunter includes Logan Lerman (the show’s de facto lead Jonah, a young adult who gets pulled into the world of Nazi hunting following the murder of his grandmother), Carole Kane, Saul Rubinek, Josh Rador, Kate Mulvany, Tiffany Boone, and Louis Ozawa Changchien. Each one is excellent, excelling each time they get a moment in the spotlight. Kane and Rubinek are a particularly dynamic duo, as a married couple who are far more badass than one might initial assume based on looks alone.
Over on Team Nazi, Lena Olin is wonderful as Pacino’s counterpart, imbuing The Colonel with more depth than is warranted by the thin scripts*. Dylan Baker gloriously chews the scenery as Biff Simpson, a Nazi who holds a Cabinet level post in the Carter Administration. And then there’s Greg Austin’s psychopathic Travis Leich. While his American accent is shaky, Austin is downright chilling an American-born Nazi assassin with a complete lack of emotions. It’s a terrifying performance.
*One of the biggest flaws of the series thus far is how little we know of our main antagonists. Sure, some of that is necessary to keep a level of suspense, but it’s hard to really care all that much about their fates when we know next to nothing about them. Why is Travis so drawn to the Nazis? No idea. How did The Colonel get her role? No clue. How did Biff get an identity that allows him to eventually gain the ear of the President? Don’t know. The trouble with making your villains Nazis is that you know the audience will never empathize with them (not a problem in principle, but potentially a problem for narrative stakes). We want them to be stopped and we want them to be held accountable for their actions. So, it’s hard to write for the characters beyond highlighting just how bad they are. When you start with a character already firmly defined as evil, there’s little room for that character to develop beyond that initial classification. I’m not entirely sure how the series can flesh the characters out at this point – outside of continuing to show just how bad they can be – but it puts the series at a clear disadvantage. The actors are giving it their all, but I can’t see any of these characters developing into richly drawn villains. There are no shades of gray here – just jet black.
And then there’s Jerrika Hinton, who plays Millie Malone, a closeted lesbian African American FBI agent who stumbles upon the entire web of killings. As the audience surrogate (a role that Lerman’s Jonah initially fills, but one he quickly outgrows as his ensnarement with the Hunters grows more complex), Hinton doesn’t get to let loose the way her co-stars do. However, at the end of the five episodes, Millie comes across as one of the show’s most interesting characters. She’s the most “normal” of the show’s leads, given a role that we all understand: the cop. As the series begins its descent into chaos (much of which I’m embargoed from delving into), having Hinton as the show’s moral center allows the audience a solid foothold. We can be just as confused and horrified as she is when she witnesses the violence of the series, and while we often know more about just who has been killing whom and why, the methodical means by which Millie is conducting the investigation gives us a clear narrative through-line to follow (in a series that desperately needs all the narrative structure it can muster). She’s the light in the darkness, if you will.
Outside of the stellar cast, things start to get a bit shaky. While I suspect the series will garner a lot of comparison to Quentin Tarantino’s distinctive style (and there are definitely comparisons to be made), showrunner David Weil is trying to chart his own path while pulling from some clear influences. Along with Tarantino, the series owes a clear debt to the 1970s blaxsploitation films (hell, Tiffany Boone’s Roxy Jones could have walked right out of one of those films). While delving deep into the imagery and cultural influences of the late ’70s, the series is also deeply rooted in its Jewishness, making the combination of these elements a new type of series (The Hollywood Reporter’s Daniel Fienberg called it “Jewsploitation,” which is as accurate a term as any I could come up with). On the surface, this all works just fine. But that’s the central problem with the series as a whole: on the surface, everything works. Once you start to drill down into the history, the narrative, and the characters, a whole host of cracks appear.
Hunters is very violent. Killing Nazis isn’t for the faint of heart, after all. But where I really found myself having trouble watching the show was in the violence it depicted in flashbacks to World War II concentration camps. It’s hard to tell the story of the atrocities committed by Nazis during the war without exploring those a bit deeper (especially as it pertains to characters within the series). But the show takes pains to create (to my knowledge, at least) fully original atrocities (one such example: a human game of chess, wherein two Jewish prisoners are forced to have their friends kill one another – something we get to watch play out in truly horrific fashion). It’s incredibly hard to stomach and I suspect it will be the same for much of the audience. There’s a delicate balance between making sure we recognize that the Nazi character are heinous and veering into the realm of torture porn. Now, I don’t think the series reveals in the violence it shows against its Jewish characters, but I often found myself wishing we were seeing less of the violence and more of the characters themselves. The violent acts take the place of actual character development at times, which is a shame.
Which leads to the most egregious sin of the series: Five episodes in, I don’t really know what story it is trying to tell. Yes, it’s about a team hunting Nazis – who in turn are hunting the hunters. There’s an FBI agent circling ever closer to the truth of the killings erupting around the country. And there’s a subplot dealing with manipulating President Carter to open immigration from South America (where a number of Nazis fled in the wake of World War II). But there’s no clear motivating factor, no narrative thrust. Killing Nazis is all well and good, but that doesn’t make a coherent narrative arc. There are small hints that something else is going on behind the scenes of the two organizations – that some people might be double agents, that there might be another reason the Hunters formed (beyond the obvious), but it’s not clear. And without anything driving the story forward (hell, without any real story beyond the “Nazi of the Episode” plot device each episode contains), the plot is just a mess of murder, torture, and the thin line of an FBI investigation.
So, should you watch Hunters? I honestly don’t know. The series is still lost as to just what it is about at this stage in the season. There are hints that it aspires to be something more than just a show about the Hunters hunting down and killing Nazis, but those hints haven’t gelled into a clear narrative yet. I suspect the story will get a great deal clearer by the end of the ten-episode season, but I can’t fully recommend it at this time. I’m planning to stick it out until the end of the season to see just where things shake out, and if it meshes into something worth watching, I’ll circle back to this review and update it. The performances are interesting, several of the characters are just complex enough to keep my attention, and I have hope that, despite the difficult visuals, the story will flesh out beyond the skeleton we have at this point.
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