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In the new series “The Hunting Party,” premiering Monday, Feb. 3, on NBC, FBI agent Rebecca “Bex” Henderson (Melissa Roxburgh, “Manifest”) tracks down escaped inmates. Patrick Sabongui and Melissa Roxburgh star in “The Hunting Party”
Cover Story On the outside: Investigators chase dangerous inmates in ‘The Hunting Party’ By Sarah Passingham What you don’t know can’t hurt you, right? While that may be true sometimes, a new procedural drama supposes what could happen if the most dangerous secret facility imaginable was breached. In the brand-new series “The Hunting Party,” premiering Monday, Feb. 3, on NBC, FBI agent Rebecca “Bex” Henderson (Melissa Roxburgh, “Manifest”) is tasked with tracking down the country’s most unpredictable inmates, who have escaped from an underground, off-the-books prison. Most people are familiar with the FBI’s most wanted list of suspects alleged to have committed serious crimes. But what happens when those suspects are brought to justice and disappear into the system, never to be heard of again? “The Hunting Party” suggests that a high-level operation of deep solitary confinement keeps America’s most vicious criminals hidden far underground, away from society.
The inciting incident in the series is an explosion revealing the classified prison hidden beneath innocuous-looking farmland. The blast sets many inmates — who have been disappeared in one way or another on paper — free to roam and possibly commit more crimes in a world that has no idea they are still alive. Skilled profiler Bex Henderson is brought in to lead a small team of highly specialized agents, only learning about the existence of the bunker facility once she’s brought on board to round up those inmates who have survived the blast and are now in the wind. Bex’s team searches for the fugitives on the loose, but as they get deeper down the rabbit hole of the investigation, it becomes clear that there was a sinister reason behind the jailbreak — the explosion was planned. “The blast was no accident,” Oliver Odell (Nick Wechsler, “Revenge”) tells Bex in the series’ official trail-
er, “Someone wanted those killers back out in the world.” Oliver, who joins Bex’s investigative team, has a romantic past with the profiler, but both agents have bigger fish to fry and try to put their past behind them to work together. The rest of the team is made up of Ryan Hassani (Patrick Sabongui, “The Flash”), Shane Florence (Josh McKenzie, “La Brea”) and Jennifer Morales (Sara Garcia, “Ride”). “The Hunting Party” was created by JJ Bailey (“Echo”), who serves as the series’ co-showrunner with writer Jake Coburn (“The Endgame”). Thor Freudenthal (“Carnival Row”) directs the series, while Keto Shimizu (“DC’s Legends of Tomorrow”) writes alongside Bailey and Coburn. All four also executive produce the show. Also starring in the series is Tobias Jelinek (“This Is Us”) as serial killer Richard Harris, who is used to introduce Bex to the secret prison. Brought in by Elizabeth Mallory (Zabryna Guevara, “New
Amsterdam”) to provide an assessment of the murderer, Bex questions why she has been asked to give a profile of a dead killer. Little does she know that Harris is alive and unwell and, now on the run, is ready for a cat-and-mouse chase with the investigator. “The longer they’re out there, the more dangerous they’re going to become,” Bex tells her team in the trailer, underlining how important it is that they find the escapees. The trailer also features shots of elaborately staged crime scenes with unnervingly posed corpses — reminiscent of the work of serial killer Hannibal Lecter, portrayed by Mads Mikkelsen (“Casino Royale,” 2006), in NBC’s beloved horror series “Hannibal.” “Highly intelligent malignant narcissists,” Bex calls the inmates they’re searching for. They are the most sophisticated and hard to pin down of all the criminals, unless of course the searching is being done by a team made up exclusively of elites like Bex.
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