The Hunting Party Showrunners Tease What to Fear About the Killers from The Pit

[Warning: The following contains spoilers from the series premiere of The Hunting Party. Read at your own risk!]

NBC may be the home of hall-of-fame procedurals like the Law & Order and One Chicago franchises, but the network is shaking things up with its latest crime The Hunting Party. Manifest alum Melissa Roxburgh headlines the new series as Rebecca "Bex" Henderson, a benched FBI agent who is called back into the field to help hunt down a serial killer who has escaped from a top-secret prison. 

The prison, referred to as The Pit, is an above-classified underground structure that holds the United States' most dangerous criminals to be studied by psychiatrists, the military, and other defense operations with a vested interest in understanding these dark minds. An explosion at the start of the premiere frees several of the prisoners, most of whom the world at large believes were already executed. Bex is the most talented serial killer profiler of her generation and The Pit's best chance at getting their dangerous prisoners back. 

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However, signing on to track down the missing killers will mean working with her old mentor, Oliver Odell (Nick Wechsler), who was allegedly let go from the FBI after he burned a suspect alive during an active investigation. She'll also be teamed up with CIA agent Jacob Hassani (Patrick Sabongui), who is there to do whatever needs to be done to catch these killers and make sure the existence of The Pit doesn't become public knowledge. 

The pilot revealed not only that Odell is the warden of the mysterious prison, but that the explosion at the top of the premiere was not an accident. Someone wanted those serial killers out on the street. Now Bex must prepare to dive back into the dark world of serial killer hunting if she wants to be able to sleep at night, and find out exactly what The Pit has been doing with these dangerous criminals. 

TV Guide caught up with co-showrunners JJ Bailey and Jake Coburn to break down the premiere and find out what to expect as The Hunting Party continues on NBC. 

TV Guide: What qualifies someone to be transferred to The Pit? There were a lot of cells before the prison blew up. 
JJ Bailey: I think, at the moment, we are exploring serial killers. Maybe down the road, we might find there are not just killers in there. 

Jake Coburn: There's a difference between what we think of as a serial killer like Jeffrey Dahmer versus somebody who commits a violent act. Part of what winds you up in The Pit is the curiosity that these doctors and the project has in the person. Is the person interesting to us? Do we want to study this person? If so, they end up here. If they're not, then they can stay on the normal trajectory of the judicial system. 

Hassani has an interesting line in the premiere about them catching killers before they're killers. Are you setting up a Minority Report kind of situation? What can you tease about what he meant there? 
Bailey: I don't know if that line is as nefarious as it sounds. He's trying to convince Bex in that moment that there's valid intel they are learning from studying serial killers so that we understand their behavior better when we see a kill out in the field. We can maybe catch a person before they become a Jeffrey Dahmer or a Ted Bundy because the information we gleaned from the people in The Pit helps us get ahead of them before they are 10 kills deep. That's just an argument that he's making. 

Coburn: Dahmer died in prison, but in an alternate history where he didn't die in prison and spent 20 years being studied by psychiatrists and criminologists, we would probably have a better understanding of what made Dahmer tick and why Dahmer became Dahmer. I think most people would agree with that. The argument in favor of The Pit and what he's done is an immoral argument, but there are practical, real results that have come from it. 

The pilot twist is that Oliver Odell is the warden of The Pit and he was recruited after he brutally murdered a suspect during an investigation. Is it safe to assume that anyone working at The Pit would have a violent past as a qualifier for working there?
Bailey: Not everybody who works there has a violent history, but if you're going to be tasked with running the prisoner side of it, I think it helps. In Odell's case, that was a qualifier they were happy to find. 

Coburn: Shane doesn't fall into the category of someone who was recruited for being violent. A lot of the prison guards had experience in the military or some other type of law enforcement. They were profiled. They went through a screening process and they got this unusual job. Odell is in charge of certain aspects of it. To so something like that, you need to find somebody who has a slightly skewed moral compass because I think most people would say this is immoral. 

Bex is someone who isn't fully on board with this prison when she first hears about it. While Odell and Hassani are kind of occupying the morally gray bad cop archetype, she's more of a rule follower but also just got benched. Where would you place her on the spectrum of bad cop to good cop? 
Bailey: She's a realist. I don't think she's necessarily the knight in shining armor. She understands that she works in a dark world and she's an agent for good in that dark world. She has a complicated enough understanding of human nature to understand why Oliver Odell did what he did, even if she doesn't condone it. There's a quote I mention fairly often, "If you stare into the darkness long enough, it stares back at you." You can't work in that world without being affected by it. Bex, in terms of being a foil for these guys, is the most rule-abiding. She's the most concerned with morality and right and wrong between the three of them. She will draw harder lines in the sand. But on the other side of that, she's catching killers and she will do what she needs to do to catch them. 

Coburn: And I think Hassani evolves into a character a little bit more moral than you might anticipate. One of the things that we love about the character is that he's a CIA guy, but he's not like Jason Clark in Zero Dark Thirty. He has a family. He talks about his kids. There's a sweetness to him that sort of evolves. He does not stay in that bad cop role, even though he does continue to embody the voice of the CIA. 

Is the CIA the governing body of The Pit? Because Bex is FBI, so who is running this show? 
Bailey: We think of it as a joint task force. Something that Jake talks about a lot is the messiness of who is in charge of this thing. It is so top secret and it is so in the dark. Who is running things is a little bit of a mystery. Several agencies are involved. A lot of people have a vested interest in this place, but who exactly the buck ends with is unclear. 

Coburn: It's been around for decades. It's been inherited by certain people from previous administrations and things like that. It's on a military base, but it is not exclusively run by the military. There are corporations who have active interests in it. There are doctors who have an active interest in it. If we're lucky enough to make this show for many, many years, we can eventually get to a point where you can see all eight legs of the octopus and really explore the messiness of it. It's a Pandora's Box of misdeeds that have occurred in this place. 

Bailey: Jake has a great quote that I love when he says, "The person ultimately responsible for The Pit is the president. The problem is that the president doesn't know about it." That's sort of helped explain that the new administration is in charge of this, but that doesn't mean they have all the information or know that it exists. That's why it's a secret. A lot of people are going to get in trouble if things get exposed. There are a lot of people who have a vested interest in keeping this quiet. 

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What were you most excited to delve into once you finished the pilot and knew it was going to series?
Bailey: We wanted to continue some of the mysteries that we set up. We were really interested in Odell. We were really interested in bringing Hassani and Bex together. We knew there was going to be a journey to have them investigating things on the same page. The thing I was most excited about was to get to the next cool killer. We've been fortunate enough to find some really interesting stories to tell for our weekly cases on top of the bigger mythology that's going on. 

Coburn: The team dynamics were really exciting to explore. … The slightly more intimate and personal stuff is really fun because our show is so run-and-gun. What is always sort of the juice of the show is figuring out what is going to make it just scary, intense, but a little weird. The fact that they have to catch a guy who is collecting the actors from a PSA that he was obsessed with that's weird. That's not a normal procedural type of thing. Every episode we sort of get to a point where it's like, "Let's go for it." We love the weirdness of each episode because it makes it feel different. 

Speaking of weird, where are you getting inspiration for the killers? Are you looking at real cases, or are you just letting the writer's room fly their freak flags?
Bailey: It's a little bit of both. We do talk about real killers. We have some episodes that touch on cases that we've seen. Oftentimes, it is just us sitting around the table coming up with the weirdest things that we can think of. We had a list on a whiteboard, top to bottom, of the strangest killers we could think of. Some of them are just way too left field, so we didn't use them. Sometimes, we find that sweet spot where it feels weird and left of center, but it is still grounded enough for us to make it an episode. 

Coburn: The gauge for me is always, "Do I want to tell people about it?" When we come up with it, and I get home or talk to my friends, do I want to tell them? Am I excited enough? I think you'll see there's an unusualness to every episode, and that's really the fun part. I wish I knew where these ideas came from because I could probably save a lot of money on therapy. 

The Hunting Party officially premieres on Monday, Feb. 3 at 10/9c, and the second episode will air the following week. Episodes are available to stream the next day on Peacock.