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canyonwalkerA few days ago Hawk and I started watching Hunters, an original show streaming on Amazon Prime Video. Wow, this show is intense.
Hunters is a thriller set in 1977. It's about a small, secretive group of vigilantes tracking down and killing Nazi leaders who escaped to the US after WWII. The main protagonist in the story is Jonah Heidelbaum, a 19-year-old Jewish man (played by Logan Lerman) who discovers the group after his grandmother, a member of the team, is murdered by one of the Nazis they are hunting. He joins their ranks but struggles with the morality of vengeance.
Stories about people hunting Nazis have been told many times many ways in American film. Action-Adventure is the most common genre; the classic war movies, where the good guys overcome tough challenges to whomp on the bad guys. Occasionally the stories are written as Horror: aging Nazis in hiding are scary, like bogeymen.
This narrative combines the best aspects of these two genres as a Thriller. The good guys struggle through challenges, while at the same time the Nazis are genuinely scary. They're up to really evil things of their own in 1977, they're at least as sneaky as the hunters, and they're hunting the hunters while the hunters are hunting them. It's an intense thriller.
Most of the Nazi-hunting stories you could compare this one to are films. This one's made for TV/streaming. Interestingly it features award-winning film actor Al Pacino in the co-lead role of Meyer Offerman, an enigmatic, aging man who bankrolls and leads the hunters. This is the first small screen role he's taken, ever. In interviews Pacino remarks that agents advised him for decades not to consider the small screen, and now he wonders if he missed out on great opportunities.
Anyway, intense. This show is intense because it's historical fiction that cuts very close to the truth. Though it's set in 1977 a lot of things that are shown are eerily relevant today. Today, though, it's not WWII Nazis in our midst we worry so much about. A person who was 20 in 1941 is 100 today! But neo-Nazi ideology, and more broadly racist, white nationalist ideology, lives on. It has even become increasingly public— and publicly accepted— the past few years.
So, watch this show if you want to root for the good guys to win. Watch this show if you want to enjoy a crackling morality tale about vigilantism. But plan to watch it slowly, because the mirror it holds up to today is alarming.
Hunters is a thriller set in 1977. It's about a small, secretive group of vigilantes tracking down and killing Nazi leaders who escaped to the US after WWII. The main protagonist in the story is Jonah Heidelbaum, a 19-year-old Jewish man (played by Logan Lerman) who discovers the group after his grandmother, a member of the team, is murdered by one of the Nazis they are hunting. He joins their ranks but struggles with the morality of vengeance.Stories about people hunting Nazis have been told many times many ways in American film. Action-Adventure is the most common genre; the classic war movies, where the good guys overcome tough challenges to whomp on the bad guys. Occasionally the stories are written as Horror: aging Nazis in hiding are scary, like bogeymen.
This narrative combines the best aspects of these two genres as a Thriller. The good guys struggle through challenges, while at the same time the Nazis are genuinely scary. They're up to really evil things of their own in 1977, they're at least as sneaky as the hunters, and they're hunting the hunters while the hunters are hunting them. It's an intense thriller.
Most of the Nazi-hunting stories you could compare this one to are films. This one's made for TV/streaming. Interestingly it features award-winning film actor Al Pacino in the co-lead role of Meyer Offerman, an enigmatic, aging man who bankrolls and leads the hunters. This is the first small screen role he's taken, ever. In interviews Pacino remarks that agents advised him for decades not to consider the small screen, and now he wonders if he missed out on great opportunities.
An Amazing Show on the Small Screen
I'm not so sure Pacino missed lots of opportunities; this streaming era is frankly a new golden age of TV. Yes, there's still a metric tonne of crap out there,"It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every 12 minutes one is interrupted by 12 dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.”
but the hunger for fresh content among streaming services leads them to take risks on ambitious series that wouldn't have been funded in years past, and the streaming medium frees show-runners from the ridiculous dictates of commercial broadcast and traditional cable TV. As Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling wrote years ago, "It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every 12 minutes one is interrupted by 12 dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.” Today it's more frequent than once every 12 minutes on traditional TV. And it's not just rabbits singing about toilet paper but aging minor league athletes smiling about erectile dysfunction pills while an announcer speed-talks through a lengthy list of harmful side effects.-- Rod Serling on why TV is mostly crap
Anyway, intense. This show is intense because it's historical fiction that cuts very close to the truth. Though it's set in 1977 a lot of things that are shown are eerily relevant today. Today, though, it's not WWII Nazis in our midst we worry so much about. A person who was 20 in 1941 is 100 today! But neo-Nazi ideology, and more broadly racist, white nationalist ideology, lives on. It has even become increasingly public— and publicly accepted— the past few years.
So, watch this show if you want to root for the good guys to win. Watch this show if you want to enjoy a crackling morality tale about vigilantism. But plan to watch it slowly, because the mirror it holds up to today is alarming.
