How ‘The Hunting Party’ Even Scared Melissa Roxburgh
NBC’s new series The Hunting Party melds a lot of TV genres into one high-concept hour. A drama about intelligence officers tracking down serial killers who’ve escaped from a secret government prison, it straddles the line between procedural and serialized mystery over the course its 10-episode first season.
“We really connected when we first met over wanting to do a procedural that felt a bit different,” says creator and co-showrunner JJ Bailey, who met fellow showrunner Jake Coburn on a “creative blind date” set up by Universal Television. “We love big serialized mysteries, but we also wanted to do a big week-to-week cases.”
Starring Melissa Roxburgh as an FBI special agent who shares a personal history with many of these criminals, each episode of the first season finds her character track down a different killer — sometimes creeping out the actress in the process. And while the writers have been informed by many real-life cases — one episode in the first season took inspiration from Scott Peterson — it’s mostly a departure from America’s disturbingly deep bench of true-crime villains. “There are a certainly a few killers in the first season who we felt like were our version of this person,” Coburn said during a recent THR Frontrunners panel, “but the most fun we have are with episodes where we don’t know it comes from.”
For Roxburgh, fresh off her four-season run on NBC/Netflix hit Manifest, the new job has some resonance with her real life. She took a few classes in criminal psychology back when she was in college. “I grew up watching a lot of the same serial killer shows, and by the time I got to college I thought it would be super cool to become a criminal profiler,” says Roxburgh. “And then I realized you actually have to talk to the bad guys in real life — and I didn’t want to do that — so I chose the made-up version instead.”
Roxburgh is not alone in her preoccupation with serial-killer content. Our collective fascination with murderers fuels hours upon hours of scripted and unscripted content every year. But Bailey and Coburn say they aren’t as interested in identifying why people are so fixated on the subject matter as much as they are in figuring out how to execute the material at level that will satisfy audiences who’ve already seen quite a bit in the genre.
“We try not to diagnose it, because we’d be diagnosing ourselves quite a bit,” says Bailey. “There is something innately confusing about the pathology of someone who would be a serial killer. So, it’s about exploring what people would think is the scariest.”
One particular bit of scare, teased during the full discussion, was almost too much for Roxburgh. The Hunting Party, which also stars Patrick Sabongui, Sara Garcia, Josh McKenzie and Nick Wechsler, airs Mondays on NBC before episodes drop on Peacock.
Watch the rest of the panel interview in the video above. This edition of THR Frontrunners is sponsored by NBCUniversal.
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