A small piece on Hunted

Okay, the series isn't over yet, so I'll keep it short. Hunted is a rare UK/US co-production currently airing on BBC One, in this country at least. Helmed in part by prolific production company Kudos - and created by one of the writers behind the X-Files - it's an action show involving spies and conspiracies and intrigue, which has lead to comparisons to Spooks.

Now, I love Spooks - and this isn't it. It's a different style of show entirely - for starters, it's less of an episodic mission-of-the-week series, and more about an ongoing investigation. Secondly, the spies aren't working for the government, they're in private security (ooh - modern and edgy!). And also, there's a definite main character, in the form of Melissa George playing Sam - and she doesn't do too badly, either.

The series is well made, very expensive - especially a first episode involving exotic locations and jaw dropping scenery (the whole show, in fact, looks gorgeous) as well as being deliberately slow and unusually paced. From then on, however, it becomes your standard conspiracy/undercover drama. The cast is reasonable, the script is reasonable... but then we come to the characters.

The show is cold - even with the odd joke here and there, its tone is serious, but it's not just that. I know it takes a while to warm to any characters - it probably took me half a season to love Ruth and Zoe and Adam and co in Spooks - but this series seems to be going out of its way to make everyone shifty and uninviting. The main character, Sam, is deliberately messed up - her past is shown to us via frenetic flashbacks, so we have to wait six weeks to discover the whole picture, unfortunately. The rest of the team are either bland or mysterious or underwritten - honestly, some characters have literally nothing to do apart from explain the plot - and the tantalising subplot about one of them being a mole means that we care very little. Everybody outside the team is either about to discover Sam's really a spy, or going to be killed a few weeks down the line.

Yes, there's some violence - done in a typically modern, extremely fast cutting, ruthless fashion. It's realistic, but sometimes gratiutious. There's also an impressive stunt or two, particularly a big explosion, and some cars. And there's also a very deliberately scary man who injects people through their eyes...

It's a very masculine show, despite the main character's gender - perhaps as a result of the American side of things. There's not that many female characters, with the antagonists being cockney business people (Patrick Malahide is enjoying himself though, and manages to pull off a pretty ludicrous character), and of those that are female, half of them seem to have got their clothes off. Hmm.

Overall? It's not a series to love, but it's expensive and watchable. Better than Torchwood's Miracle Day, for sure. Whether it's going somewhere, who the hell knows?