Hunters has a premise that should be impossible to waste. A diverse band of Nazi hunters in 1977 New York City discovers that numerous escaped Nazi officers are living in America and conspiring to build a Fourth Reich, with the real history of Operation Paperclip, the government program that brought German scientists to the United States, running underneath. David Weil created it for Amazon Prime Video, it premiered on February 21, 2020, and it wastes a great deal of that premise anyway.
Trailer, via Prime Video.
Pacino and Lerman
Al Pacino plays Meyer Offerman, the wealthy survivor who bankrolls the hunt, and Logan Lerman plays Jonah Heidelbaum, the young man drawn into it. Pacino is the reason to watch. He is playing a mentor with secrets and he plays it with the full weight of his career behind him. Lerman is a good, grounded presence, and their scenes together are the show’s best.
Around them are Jerrika Hinton as FBI agent Millie Morris, Josh Radnor, Kate Mulvany, Louis Ozawa, Tiffany Boone and Carol Kane as the rest of the team, with Lena Olin and Greg Austin on the other side. Jennifer Jason Leigh joins in the second season.
The Tone Problem
Hunters wants to be a pulp revenge fantasy and a serious drama about the Holocaust at the same time, and it does not have the control to be both. Grindhouse flourishes sit next to scenes of real atrocity, and the show’s stylized violence keeps undercutting the weight it also wants to claim. The characters are drawn from real Nazi hunters across the decades without representing any of them, which frees the writing and also unmoors it.
The Conspiracy
The Fourth Reich plot is the kind of thing that works as a comic book and strains as a drama. The show’s twists are big, and the biggest of them, at the end of the first season, is a swing that either lands for you or breaks the series. It broke it for a lot of viewers.
Season Two
Amazon renewed the show in August 2020 for a second and final season, which premiered on January 13, 2023, and it plays like a show that knows it is ending. It is tighter, and it has the good sense to give Pacino more to do. It cannot fix the foundation.
Where It Works
When the show slows down and lets its survivors talk, it has real power. The 1977 setting is well built, and the idea that the war did not end for the people who fought it is one the series takes seriously in its better hours.
The Verdict
Hunters is an ambitious show with a great actor at its center and a tone it never gets under control. The premise deserved better discipline than it got.
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