A Spoiler-Free Review of Hunters

Anna-Liisa and I just finished watching the first season of Hunters. What a colossal disappointment! I wish I could go back in time and skip the last two episodes of the season. Before driving the story off a cliff, the show’s writers subject the audience to twists that would make a daytime soap-opera writer blush.

Look, don’t get me wrong, it was a fun ride (well, most of it). As Barbara Kay rightly observes, Hunters “is a mash-up of Inglorious Basterds, Hawaii Five-O, The Simon Wiesenthal Story, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and Spider-Man (except instead of being able to spin webs and fly between buildings, the Spider-guy figure is a codebreaker).”

At times the show is downright brilliant. For instance, I’ll not soon forget that chilling conversation between a sleazy Swiss banker and Meyer Offerman (played by Al Pacino), a Jewish philanthropist and Holocaust survivor who leads the Nazi hunters. The conversation between Meyer and Simon Wiesenthal is also remarkably powerful.

The show is also incredibly fun to watch for purely superficial, eye-candy reasons: the 1970s-era costumes are almost as gorgeous as Tiffany Boone. Even so, I won’t be watching the second season of this show. The writers have killed off all of my favorite characters—and, apparently, developed a pretty serious crack habit. Like the stock market before the coronavirus, you may wanna cash out of Hunters before it tanks.