Oh boy it’s a 2025 high-profile live-action prestige TV series based around the failings of the American medical system set in a disaster zone called the Pit.
I mean, it’s not a lot, but it is weird that it happened twice.
Spoiler Warning: The Hunting Party is a thriller-conspiracy story, which means that just telling you about things in the series can be seen as ‘spoiling’ the surprise.
Content Warning: The type of show The Hunting Party is is a crime thriller with serial killer of the week characters, who are usually made to serve as threatening, horrifying monsters, which also means almost every episode starts with a scene of someone, usually a woman, being threatened, and often it’s implied killed. This is just part and parcel of the genre, and it sucks, and The Hunting Party does not avoid this.
In The Hunting Party, the government has this big super-secret super-prison where they keep people who have been falsely executed – not executed for bad reasons, but the executions were faked – and stored for research into serial killers. The premise of the prison is that thanks to the prison, in universe, serial killers are rarer, because they’ve successfully treated or pre-emptively prevented much of America’s serial killers, which I assume means that the main thing the Pit does is make guns too expensive to own.
Then one day, an explosion blows something up at the Pit and a bunch of prisoners escape, staff are killed, and the records of both are lost. The people in charge scrabble for every resource that they can use to recover what they lost, and that includes calling up an old FBI agent who caught one of the escapees from the Pit, Rebecca “Bex” Henderson. She has to get looped in to explain why she is now hunting a man she thought was executed eight years ago, and thus the story begins.
Bex is a profiler (not a thing) and a detective; she’s working with Shane, a former Pit guard, Agent Hassani, a CIA liaison, and O’Dell, her former mentor at the FBI and warden of the Pit. Yes, that is a 3:1 ratio, and annoyingly, two of those guys are dark-haired beardies who push back against Bex’s ideas, which means yes, it is a bit like she’s in a room with the same dude twice. What follows is a story about known serial killers with a previously described method, then a sort of mid-plot twist on every single one of them. There’s danger, and tension, and a bunch of serial killers and every episode ends with the baddie being caught as the greater mystery is slowly revealed and nothing bad ever happens except for all the murders and people who die and are traumatised.
The Hunting Party falls into a special kind of category of show that I broadly speaking, quite like, which is a show about crime wizards. The whole framework pretends to be about the real world, about plausible or possible things that people can really do, then the villains in the episodes are depicted as being fantastically and unnecessarily competent. They’re supernaturally sneaky or efficient, they’re impossibly skilled at what they’re doing, capable of manipulation on a multi-year scale and unstoppable like a slasher villain (until it’s the last four minutes of the episode).
I don’t mind a crime wizard show, and the crime wizardness tends to be about elaborateness in setpieces. Impressive scenes of people being killed, gory body arrangements, ridiculous murder weapons. They’re fun! What The Hunting Party has working for it in its favour as a Crime Wizard show is that, because of the recency of the escapees, there’s only a few weeks for the escapees to do anything, and they pop up to get caught with very little infrastructural support. There’s no vast criminal empires or sprawling conspiracies, yet, because the villains in The Hunting Party may work like crime wizards, but their wizardry has to be impromptu and convenient.
Plus, the experimental nature of the Pit, doing drugs and brain surgery and advanced therapy on the people who live there, serves as a great explanation for why the people who populate the Pit act in really weird ways, or have really weird abilities, or even in one case, are worse at being serial killers because of their treatment they’ve experienced.
It’s a really good set of conceits and timing! It does run the risk of running out this interesting concept by dragging the story out, with season after season of constantly searching for the Pit’s members maybe over a course of a few weeks that feel increasingly and increasingly dense and where all the staff in the show seemingly start to age out of their roles.
And here’s where inevitably, the review has to invoke the only reason I would bother to talk about The Hunting Party which is because The Hunting Party is following in the legacy of another crime wizard show, Blacklist. I gave Blacklist too much of my life, based entirely on the idea that Blacklist promised an interesting criminal conspiracy narrative executed on by two charismatic leads. One of them, Raymond Reddington, was played by James Spader and owned every scene he was in, creating an intricate layer of plausible complexities around the other character, Elizabeth Keene, played by Joanna Thrimble, who left the show twice because there was nothing for her to do and that’s not even the actress’ name but you probably didn’t notice because her name was actually Megan Boon, but no actually I did it again, the actress’ name was Megan Boone, but again that’s not true because Megan Boone didn’t play Elizabeth Keene, she played Elizabeth Keen and this is the most interesting thing Elizabeth Keen ever did in the show.
The Blacklist is rubbish. The show literally never ascends above the height of its first episode, where it presents interesting questions that beg for answers then every answer it gives over the course of its ten years in the most boring way. I had genuine hope, during the period of the story’s wheel-spinning, that it was building up to a pretty impressive twist, with the big revelation that we were following the most well-documented stylish trans man in mainstream live-action TV, but no, the story kind of just farts out at the end.
Blacklist was an incredibly successful, well made show that has nowhere to go and nothing to say. It centers supposedly on a woman main character and it constantly spends its time finding ways to avoid her doing anything cool or good or impressive. She exists to be an audience surrogate, and routinely knows nothing about what she sees, because she’s the person outside of a conspiracy who has to make sense of it. Her character is a charisma void positioned alongside one of the most magnetic men in television getting to ham himself up endlessly. Her job, according to the story’s establishing premise, is that she’s a profiler (not a real thing) and she’s the best at it, meaning she can just immediately and intuitively know things about people, but the Blacklist narrative is about constantly putting her in the same room as people where that would be useful, and don’t let her do it (because it would ruin the plot they have set up).
And here’s the thing.
The Hunting Party is not a show that does a lot to address the problems of what Blacklist presents itself as being. It’s a conspiracy show that focuses on a woman main character who’s meant to have an important and impressive insight into people, who has an important relationship with her daughter and a tension with an ex in the room who she knows does something shifty that she can’t trust necessarily. It is so structurally similar to The Blacklist that it is shocking to me to realise that in one season, The Hunting Party handling Bex pisses all over everything that The Blacklist had going on.
Bex gets captured by opponents, repeatedly. But when she’s bested by a killer, there’s something they have as a result of desperation and she puts up a fight anyway. When she’s captured, yes, she needs to hold out for the cavalry, but sometimes she can solve the problem on her own through insight into the opponent and then either getting a weapon or just hitting them repeatedly. Its main character has some agency.
Don’t worry, I’m sure it won’t last.
There’s only one season of The Hunting Party as I write this (I’m not going to watch the second season until it’s done) and it concluded on a pair of cliffhangers. There’s a novel idea in the ending of that first season, a promise of conspiracy and an indication that say, the American intelligence apparatus and pharmaceutical organisation are bad and criminal and doing terrible things, and yeah! That’s not a bad place to start! Cool!
I don’t imagine it’ll go anywhere that impressive or cool. Enjoying conspiracy thriller fiction is learning to negotiate with disappointing resolutions, after all.
Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!
I've slowly been chipping away at drawing scenes from that imaginary Muppet retelling of the Princess Bride, figured it was about time to share what I've drawn on Tumblr!
hey man. nice regional dialect. mind if i apply some baseless assumptions about your personhood to it? i was also gonna prescribe morality to it as well. if that’s cool with you
house I am staying in for work usually houses a ~christian marriage counselor~ and I flipped through a book and stopped in my tracks. it had not occurred to me, no.
There’s this trick I used to do, when the people I interacted with the most were about my own age, with my own general media framework. It was a trick about testing people’s ability to retain information without specific assistance.
It ran basically this; first, I asked them when their mother’s birthday was. Typically speaking, immediately, this prompted a sort of haha embarrassment that they couldn’t quite do it, oops, that’s a bit silly. If they did remember their mother’s birthday, I’d check if they could remember their mother’s phone number, which pretty much caught everyone the first question missed.
And then, after a beat, when the giggles about what they can’t remember settled down, I’d ask, ‘Where do Gummi Bears bounce?’
Reliably, they’d be able to respond with ‘Here and there and everywhere.’
This prompted a little conversation about how infectious and easily remembered kids’ shows from the 90s were, because they were all reruns from the 80s, and that usually led to a conversation about the best ones or the worst ones and in many cases, they were conversations done with almost no reference to the cartoons in question. It was just a matter of stuff that we could remember. The cartoons, we had a fondness for them, but in my experience at least, the things that stood out tended to be ‘good shows.’ The Disney corporation, for example, was quite capable of hiring people to make good music.
Anyway, wanna hear some of the ear worms that still rattle around in my skull, that thanks now to Youtube, I have been able to go back and put in meaningful context?
Disney’s Adventures of the Gummi Bears - Theme Song | Disney+ Throwbacks | Disney+
Let me start with the example, and also, a simple theme that I think serves as a good calibration. Gummi Bears is a song that is pretty simply ‘a song.’ It promises a story about the Gummi Bears of Gummi wood, and largely, setting aside the strange moral presumptions of the lyric the fight for what’s right is whatever they do, it is a show that delivers on that. The main cast are all there, but the song doesn’t give a rundown on who they are, and the singer is here to do their job. There are places the song can be a lot easier, and it even avoids the trope of a ‘list of names’ song that’s meant to make things more marketable.
It’s a Disney production and I’m not going to include many of them, because thanks to their quality and ubiquity, I think they probably got screened way more than similar songs of the period. Even when I went to grab in my mind for ‘the ones with forgettable themes,’ it was kinda mostly heaters until the shows that coincidentally, were popular when I stopped watching saturday morning cartoons. Is the Bonkers theme forgettable compared to the Chip N Dale theme, or had I just turned thirteen?
But okay, Gummi Bears is in my opinion, the robust standard for a show with a pretty good theme song that was also, pretty good. There’s no over-promise here, the show is solid, the theme is solid, and it’s catchy because of something that actually relates to the show. Honestly, I think that while Gummi Bears is hardly a good show, I don’t feel embarrassed to remark that at some point in my childhood I probably had a crush on Sunni Gummi. Or maybe that’s just that I had a crush on Katie Leigh’s voice?
Wait that means I could transfer the crush to Honker Muddlefoot. That can’t be right.
M.A.S.K. Intro HQ (English)
With Gummi Bears established, I want to talk about a song which has a Problematic Quality Gap between the show and the theme, the introduction to M.A.S.K. writes a big cheque the show can’t cash. Oh, the show is perfectly good at filling a time gap between ads, and I’ve no doubt I watched quite a bit of it, but the promise of this show where people used infiltration techniques and clever technology to solve problems rather than just finding baddies mid-act and shooting them was smashed to pieces upon watching the second episode since turning into an adult.
I’ve written about M.A.S.K. in the past and will continue to do so because it’s really funny. Still, the theme stuck with me and it’s one of the best themes attached to a completely terrible show. Turns out that ‘being catchy’ is not actually anything necessarily attached to ‘clear narrative with meaningful reasons to engage.’
SilverHawks | Theme Song Opening | Warner Bros. Entertainment
Silverhawks lives in a similar space to M.A.S.K. but it’s much closer aligned between ‘is the show good?’ and ‘is the theme an absolute ear worm?’ Particularly, it’s got this incredible set of lines in the chorus, wings of silver, nerves of steel which definitely left an impression but it’s then followed up by the ridiculously dumb lyrics partly metal, partly real. Which I guess worked just fine for a child who doesn’t quite understand what ‘real’ means but I doubt I could hum the tune to this and have anyone else recognise it.
Silverhawks is also lucky in that it didn’t seem to get a presence on Youtube the way most of these bootlegs-nobody-cares shows did, which means I couldn’t go back and check just how mediocre it was. You win this round, Rankin/Bass.
Special mention, Fat Albert has really good, catchy theme tune but I’m trying to keep the number of confirmed rapists in these videos to a minimum.
The Family-Ness Theme Song (HQ)
Now, here’s a big step down in quality, in my opinion, of both the show and the theme, that nonetheless managed to stay lodged in my head for decades. The show Family-Ness is probably obscure enough to merit some kind of quick crash course, but fortunately the theme song does it. Set on the coast of Loch ness, the Family Ness are a group of Loch Ness Monsters, all related, and with names that end with -ness, that uh, come out occasionally to do stuff. This is a British show, and the episodes are much shorter, which makes it more like Bananaman (another show with a really strong theme, but where I actually like some of the jokes because it was written by The Goodies, even if they hated making it).
The thing that stands out to me about Family Ness is that it does the roll-call opening where it mentions a bunch of characters; Ferociousness, Loveliness, Sportiness and Eyewitness (which is why he has an eyepatch, you see). And you know what, shout out to the folks trying to get kids to recognise the name Elspeth, nice to see that classic being known before Magic: The Gathering ran it out.
Anyway, the song kind of sucks? It sticks in the head, the boppy middle is fine, but the whole first section isn’t really part of the song, and gosh, ‘without a care’ and ‘with a bash and a crash’ are fantastic lyrics for avoiding actually putting anything in the song.
There’s more than a few songs of this ilk from shows of the time. The Raggie Dolls, The Ratties and Jimbo & The Jet-Set all had themes about this style. If you’re Australian, you might be wondering ‘hey, what about Alias the Jester?’ Well, I already said in Gummi Bears I wasn’t going to bother talking more about shows and songs that are good.
Said, staring straight at you and refusing to blink.
Dinosaucers Intro/Theme Song - True Remaster (480p HQ)
Look I started this list so I could complain and I’m now done with being fair and reasonable about things. I want to complain about something targeted at me which stood so large in my memory, which I loved greatly, and which, upon examination later was so much dust.
Dinosaucers is a show about trying to get children to buy toys that failed so badly as a cartoon that the toys never got made. The show subsequently was dumped to secondary markets at a reduced rate, and those markets, hungry for more stuff to pad out kid’s viewing blocks, put Dinosaucers in whatever who-cares-it’ll-do space and that’s why I was waking up at FIVE IN THE MORNING on a SATURDAY to watch the ONE SLOT where they were going to screen this absolute failure of a show, and it was because I couldn’t stop thinking
about the theme song.
And it’s not even a theme song! It’s a word! It’s one word, a horn toot, and some dialogue from the show! It’s nothing! And the show in the shape of it was just as hollow as that! This is perhaps one of the most enduring ear worm ‘songs’ compared to the quality of the show under it, I have and the only reason it doesn’t top the list is because I can accept arguments that it’s not quite a ‘song.’
AND IT GETS WORSE.
Pole Position Intro/Theme Song (Remastered 720p HD)
I have heard this theme song three times in my life.
Once, on a rental tape – perhaps even a beta tape, not a VHS – I watched this show. It was unremarkable. I probably watched it a few times over a week and then the tape went back to the rental place and life moved on. But that keening, whining, Pole posiitiiiionnnnnnnnn, something something bagh chontrollllll, that’s been in my head since then.
When Youtube first became a prominent part of my life, I thought ‘I wonder if it has,’ and I listened to the theme again. And realised that that had been a song I could more or less perfectly replicate in tone and style my whole life, despite having heard it, at that time, once.
To make sure I wasn’t imagining it, I pressed play on this video and listened to it, again. Now. And you know what? Still 100% right. Completely templated in my goddamn brain.
The show is meant to be a tie-in with the Pole Position videogame. And it sucks.
Conclusion
The reason that this game doesn’t work any more is because these shows are old enough that most people my age don’t remember them at all. The Gummi Bears cartoon has some endurance, but not much. The Ducktales have a successful remake, which also references Tailspin and Darkwing Duck. Time has moved on from this period, and, nobody expects to be able to remember their mum’s phone number or birthday either. These are tasks that we’ve outsourced to another extelligence! It’s very normal to do that and not being able to go without those devices is, rightly, seen as an asshole move!
Time has claimed even the bit.
Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!
I stand before you with a quandrary. A frustration. A puzzlement that bamboozles my very being. I am, you see, currently possessed and beset on all sides with fascination and interest and even enthrallment with a game. What’s more, this isn’t a game as most games are games, for this is a game that has been itself, and then another game and now it is another game and throughout that entire history, I have been imagining playing the game. There’s an immense interest here, and the game is good, but also –
That is, my reader, I have finally played Netrunner. I have played the game that I, a twenty-plus year veteran of Magic: The Gathering, have mostly heard described as Richard Garfield’s ‘better game.’
And y’know what, I get it.
Netrunner is an asymmetrical two-player head-to-head cardgame where one player takes on the role of an evil megacorporation, but I repeat myself, doing something nefarious in a cyberpunk dystopia, and the other player takes on the role of some kind of criminal hacker, the titular Net Runner. Each player has a materially different set of mechanics that interact with all the same pieces. The hacker wants to grab pieces and plans and short-term objectives and gear and friends, and the Corporation wants to establish a sprawling network of remote servers that represent their long-term goals (called Agendas) and ways to interact with their infrastructure. This includes defenses, and sub-plans, and even traps and scams designed to exploit a curious hacker’s interest.
Now, again, I’ve played this game once, but good lord it is not hard to see the way this game’s design space invites people to get feral about it. It’s also hard to talk about without resorting to just pointing at single, specific, interesting ideas in it, because while ostensibly, this game is a thing that you, the player, are meant to be able to discuss as its own thing, it’s kind of hard to avoid the comparison to the most well known and well distributed TCG in the world.
For example, the Runner and the Corporation exist in completely different contexts of their needs and the ways they are at risk to one another. The Runner can lose by having no cards in hand, for example, while the Corporation, that’s fine, there’s always more room for more cards. The Runner wants to attack the Corporation’s servers and other resources, but they can also attack the Corporation’s discard pile (I had to resist calling it ‘graveyard’ there), the deck, and even their hand. Any time the Runner goes looking in these spaces and finds an Agenda card, the things that let you win the game, the Runner just gets that.
This means that on the one hand, the Corporation feels unassailable at first. They get cards every turn, they get to set up a huge set of structures and ways to defend those structures, they get stuff so easily. But suddenly, when you have an agenda somewhere – in your hand or on the table – you’re paranoid about what might happen to it just because it’s out there. But you can’t hold onto it forever because your hand is also vulnerable. What’s more, if you don’t have any agendas, and the runner knows that then suddenly the top of your deck is scary because you might lose agendas before you ever see them.
Now, Netrunner is the same kind of game as Magic: The Gathering, which is a game with a reasonably complicated framework, in which individual cards introduce new complexities, and which therefore, are going to be chosen and added to a deck in order to relate to other complexities. Essentially, this is a game with a pretty ferocious mastery gap, that gap is going to go away through practice, and I don’t have any way to practice.
At the moment.
This is something of a call for help – hopefully someone out there who knows Netrunner well will point me to some kind of online client for new loser dorks like me, because the thing that has gotten me better at playing Magic: The Gathering is a way to easily, conveniently, and freely play it every day, which is why I clocked more hours in Magic: The Gathering Arena last year than I did in Magic: The Gathering Online lifetime, and why my draft count for arena has lapped my draft count for Online even though I’ve been playing on MODO for nearly 22 years.
A mastery gap refers to the idea of where one player knowing more about what is in a game leading to that player having a better awareness of and therefore likelihood to win in the game at all. To use a Magic: The Gathering example, if you don’t know counterspells exist, you can’t play around them, and indeed, the way that Counterspells seem to come out of nowhere, necessarily for most new players, sure seems like a rude shock that permanently sours the experience. As it was, in my first playthrough, I wasn’t aware of how something I thought was ‘hard’ to break through (because it had been the first time) was, in fact, ‘easy’ to break through because of the addition of one card.
I don’t feel bad about it, after all, the person I was playing with was doing me a favour.
One of the things about Netrunner that’s most important to me at the moment is that it’s a community-driven game franchise at this point. As best I understand it, it’s not a business, it’s not going to be able to support itself on the basis of pulling in prize money or dragging players into its space with incentives. The only thing Netrunner has going for it is being a really interesting game, made for people who want to play it and love playing it, and want to introduce more people to loving playing it. This is as I understand it a pretty remarkably virtuous thing, especially knowing that the game under the hood only kind of gets to exist because it’s pulling bits, vulture-like, out of the corpse of a corporate franchise.
Which is itself, very cyberpunk.
Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!
snowghoul
germansingergirl
baratheonpilled
prguitarman
discoholicmusic
