TV Review by Kerey McKenna.
Amazon’s new original streaming series, Hunters, is a historical fiction pulp tale about a shadow war between Jews and Nazis in 1970s America. Odd that Amazon is going back to the Nazis in America angle so soon after putting their previous series The Man in the High Castle to bed, but hey, at least in this series we didn’t have to wait four seasons for those goose stepping goons to get their comeuppance.
Not just set in 1970s America as a period piece, Hunters also takes over-the-top steps to callback to 1970s action movies like fantasy sequences resembling 1970s era game shows, PSAs, and Grindhouse movie trailers. In fact the whole project probably owes as much to the pulpy B-movies and sensational pulp fare like Madmen of Mandoras and The Damned as it does to more “serious” Nazi hunting classics like The Boys from Brazil and The Odessa File.
The audience point of view character, Jonah Heidelbaum (Logan Lerman), is a mild-mannered comic book nerd just trying to survive “The Summer of Sam,” hang out with his nerdy friends, and scrape together enough money for college and to help his only living relative, his Holocaust survivor grandmother Ruth (Jeannie Berlin), who raised him. Unfortunately his world is torn apart when his grandmother is murdered one night by a mysterious stranger at their door. Jonah would be the first to point out that he is just a few details removed from being Peter Parker. At the shiva, he is approached by wealthy pillar of the New York Jewish community, Meyer Offerman (Al Pacino). Offerman reveals to Jonah that Ruth, who like him was a survivor of a Nazi death camp, was killed by a Nazi war criminal they both knew from the camps. Not only that but for the past year Offerman and Ruth had been working on their own, independent of the US authorities, Mossad, or even The Simon Wiesenthal Center to track down escaped Nazi war criminals and dispense justice. Simon Wiesenthal himself (Judd Hirsch) at one point even makes an appearance to wag his finger and say that he does not approve of Meyer’s methods and definition of justice, chiefly executing the Nazis or arranging for “accidents” and death traps that mirror the atrocities they committed. Like in the first episode, when we see a former Nazi chemist (now a NASA scientist) discovering in her final moments that her shower has been rigged to dispense the same gas she developed for the death camps.
Of course, thirty years after the Holocaust, Meyer and Ruth were a bit long in the tooth, so they recruited a cadre of interested parties and mercenaries, “The Hunters,” to assist in the location and then the execution of the Nazis. Joining them on their crusade are B-list actor Leonard “Lonny Flash” Flazhenstien (Josh Radnor), Vietnam Veteran Joe Mizushima (Louise Ozawa), nun and (former?) MI6 agent Sister Harriet (Kate Mulvany), kick ass hood girl Roxy Jones (Tiffany Boon channeling classic Pam Grier), and fellow camp survivors Murray and Mindy Markowitz (Saul Rubinek and Carol Kane). Interesting fact: Jewish actor Saul Rubinek was actually born in a post-war refugee camp after his parents had successfully hidden for over two years in Nazi-occupied Poland.
While these are the titular “Hunters,” it would be fair to argue that the show is actually about three groups of hunters. The main conceit of the series is that not only did far too many Nazi war criminals escape the hangman’s noose, sometimes with the aid of the US government (as they did in real life), but that some of these Nazis are working together in secret to bring about a new Fourth Reich. So the Jews and the Nazis are hunting each other.
One such nasty Nazi was even able to completely reinvent himself as red-blooded American and Washington insider “Biff Simpson” (Dylan Baker) and turns out not only to be an adept master of disguise, but as dangerous as a rabid animal when cornered. When we first meet him his brilliant solution for preserving his cover after being outed at a family BBQ by a Holocaust survivor, is to gun her down, and his guests, and his own family.
While Biff has problems with impulse control, that is not so for the Nazis’ ringleader, the mysterious SS She Wolf known only as “The Colonel” (Lena Olin). As the terrorist mastermind behind the efforts to build a new Aryan America, she is not only keeping the old guard in line but raising new generations of blond-haired blue-eyed operatives, and radicalizing them with a twisted ideology in which Nazis are portrayed as the real persecuted minority.
The final point of this Axis of Evil is one of these young neo-Nazis, Travis Leich (Greg Austin). In a character arc that is a malicious mirror of the arc of the heroic Jonah, Travis struggles to prove himself among the more seasoned veterans of his faction. He always seems to be taking crap from the other Hitler youth, probably either because he likes contemporary musicals instead of the traditional Wagner, or because the Teutonic Tossers just don’t recognize a self-radicalized American as a true peer. Huh, I guess even OG Fascists hate Illinois Nazis.
Finally trying to make sense of the trail of murder and mayhem left behind by both groups is FBI agent Millie Morris (Jerrika Hinton). Poor Morris has the thankless task of being the Inspector Javert of the piece and having to do so as a “triple threat” minority in 1970s law enforcement.
Eventually the cat and mouse game leads to a grand shootout not just to find escaped Nazi war criminals, but to thwart their doomsday plot to ensure a Fourth Reich on American soil. Once the dust settles, and after setting up an “adventure continues” plot hook for the second season, the show reveals one hell of a final twist. Well it was clearly trying to set up two incredible twists for the finale but you can see the second one coming a mile away as soon as the caption “Argentina 1977” pops up.
As I said, I was captivated by the show as I watched it and I think its heart is in the right place, but sometimes the jarring gear shifts between a reflection on historical atrocities to cartoon shoot-em-up against cartoon villainy was a bit hard to reconcile. But maybe there is something in that. Late in the season the show’s soundtrack uses a song that had been running through my head since I heard the premise of the series: Tom Lehrer’s “tribute” to former Nazi rocket scientist, turned head NASA rocket scientist Wernher von Braun.
I had known the song for years (I had a hipster “classic” music satire phase as a teen). Yet by that point in the series, I was reflecting truly how dark the satire was. That maybe we should be more embarrassed that Von Braun built the space program. Frankly I was a little unsettled when I realized that von Braun had personally narrated a piece about space travel for Disney that I had enjoyed when I was young. Which ultimately is the point of good satire, not just to make us laugh but to challenge us.
As for the final verdict on Hunters? I enjoyed it. The maudlin parts were done well and I think I read its campy sensibilities as intended. But then again maybe I’m not the best person to decide of all that ham and cheese is “Kosher” for such subjects (Check out our follow-up post, "Flippant Entertainment," in which Nerds who Read Senior Editor Michael Isenberg weighs in on exactly that issue.).
Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival, coming to Waltham MA May 9, 2020. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.
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