Genre: TV Drama/Thriller (first episode)
Premise: When his grandmother is killed in her home, a young man is visited by a mysterious older fellow who explains that Nazis have infiltrated America and they need to be hunted down and killed.
About: This is one of Amazon’s big-swing TV shows they’re hoping becomes the next water cooler franchise – as much as water cooler shows can exist in the age of “Everybody Watches Shows On Their Own Timeframe Now.” The show comes from Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions (more on that in a second) and is created by David Weil. If that name sounds familiar to Scriptshadowers, that’s because you’ve heard it before. In fact, there’s a little bit of screenwriting infamy associated with the script he broke in with. More on that in a bit as well.
Writer: David Weil
Details: 90 minutes
This show’s backstory is almost as mysterious as its plot. “Hunters” was one of the first big shows announced from Monkeypaw Productions – Jordan Peele’s production company – after Get Out. Yet in the lead up this week to the show’s Amazon debut, Peele was never mentioned. His connection is so muted, in fact, I had to check to see if this was the same Nazi show he was a part of.
Even in the standard press releases on the trade sites, Peele’s name is never mentioned. I can’t convey to you how bizarre this is. It would be like someone producing a Tarantino script never mentioning the movie was written by Quentin Tarantino.
This has inspired me to throw on my tin foil anti-vax 9-11-was-an-inside-job hat and make a bold statement that, even though it’s pure conjecture, I’m 95% sure is true. I believe Jordan Peele saw the first cut of this show and said, “I don’t want my name associated with this in any way.” Because seriously, why else would Amazon not mention that this is a Jordan Peele show? It’s got to be because it’s terrible.
And it is. It’s very terrible.
The show opens on a small pool party in an undisclosed time period, although the clothing and hair imply it’s probably the 70s or 80s. All of a sudden, a Jewish woman starts screaming and pointing. Everybody stares at her like she’s nuts, even the host of the party, who appears to be the person she’s pointing at. Finally we get some semblance of what she’s yelling. Butcher. Killer. That man was a Nazi who killed tons of people in the concentration camps.
The host, who seems perplexed by this accusation, calmly walks over to his grill, takes out a hidden silencer gun, and shoots all eight people at the party, saving the last bullet for the screaming woman. Before he shoots her, his American accent shifts to German. She was right, he tells her. Bang.
Cut to our hero, a young college-aged kid named Jonah, who’s coming out of a screening of Star Wars with his buddies. Still have no idea what year it is. The kids speak like people today but are dressed like kids from the 80s. So confusing. Afterwards, Jonah meets up with an older kid, which is when we learn the nerdy Jonah is a hardcore drug dealer (he’s got like 2 pounds of weed on him). None of this makes any sense but whatever. The older kid only pays half price and then beats Jonah up for wanting the rest of his money.
Jonah then goes home to his New York townhouse. He lives with an older woman who I’ll later learn from summaries of the show is his grandmother. But when you’re watching the show, no relation is ever explained. He keeps calling her “Sultey,” to confuse matters even more. Later that night, someone breaks in and shoots Sultey.
Cut to Florida where an old Jewish woman is watching game shows. An evil looking Asian plumber man comes out of her bathroom and informs her that “it’s” fixed. The large old woman then goes to take a shower, which begins with gratuitous elderly nudity. Once inside the shower, she notices the door latch is locked, and instead of water coming down, it’s gas. The woman dies soon after.
Back to Jonah, who, at his grandmother-in-summaries-only funeral, is approached by an old man (Al Pacino) who implies that there’s something more going on here with his grandmother’s death. Jonah then takes the rest of his drug stash with the plan to hire a street gang to find out if they know anything about the guy who killed his grandma. The plan backfires, but Jonah eventually discovers a series of clues that lead him to the killer, who it turns out is a Nazi. Jonah will need to make a choice on whether he’s ready to kill a man and join… the hunt.
This show is awful.
But before I eviscerate it, I have to give props to the opening scene. I read a lot of not-so-good TV pilot teasers. But this one was great. First of all, if you’re going to have a scene with a Nazi killing a bunch of people, the obvious place to set it is somewhere dark and scary. Which is exactly why you don’t want to set it in someplace dark and scary. By setting this opening massacre at a bright happy pool party, you invite a sense of irony into the scene. Once Weil did that, he didn’t have to do much else. The acting between the screaming woman and the secret Nazi host was soooooo good that the scene killed.
It goes to show that setup is most of your job as a writer. If you set up a great scenario, the scene will write itself. And this scene did.
That’s where my praise ends, though.
Let’s move to the introduction of our main character Jonah. Actually, no, let’s go further back. Nobody tells us what year it is. Which would MAYBE be okay if your execution of the time was so perfect that we knew exactly what year it was. Like “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” You didn’t need to tell us anything for us to know it was 1969. But here, the dress code and the way people speak is vague enough that we could be in any year between 1970 and 1983.
Why is this relevant? Well, the introduction to our hero happens after he and his friends come out of Star Wars. As they’re coming out, the three are going into deep detail about what Star Wars is and what the characters represent in a manner no different than 1000 people debating Star Wars on Reddit today.
The thing is, people didn’t debate Star Wars when it came out. They just went and celebrated the movie because there was no complain culture back then and the franchise hadn’t been over-sold yet. And if they did debate it, it was only after watching it dozens of times. Not for the very first time. Which brings us back to the time period issue. Was this 1977 when Star Wars first came out? Or was it a re-release year? If this was a re-release, their debate would make a little more sense. But the fact that I’m so confused about something so simple within seven minutes of starting your show is a REALLY BAD SIGN.
But even if you look past that, you can’t look past the dialogue here, which is some of the most clumsy try-hard “written” dialogue I’ve seen in a professional production in a long time. In one scene, Jonah is hanging out with his two lame friends at the beach who are mindlessly looking at girls and calling out, “Jane” or “Tarzan.” Jonah finally asks them what Jane and Tarzan mean (which makes zero sense, by the way, since these three are all best friends and therefore would’ve already discussed this together a long time ago). Here’s their response:
“Oh, we call ‘Jane’ if the chick’s squish-mittens are trimmed. And then Tarzan if it looks like her Harry Manilow’s an all-out pube jungle.”
I can say with 100% certainty that in the history of the world, no person has ever talked like this. This is “written” dialogue, the kind of stuff you pat yourself on the back for coming up with despite the fact that no one would actually say it. And people will argue that movie dialogue isn’t supposed to be 100% realistic. I agree with that. But there’s a difference between upping the quality of conversation in written material and straight up try-hard gibberish.
Since Star Wars was a part of this pilot, let me reveal a quote from the great Harrison Ford to one George Lucas: “George, you can write this stuff. But you sure as s#@% can’t say it.”
Same deal with Hunters. Because people aren’t talking like real people, we don’t believe what we’re watching. The suspension of disbelief is broken. And that happens over and over again in this abomination of a show.
There’s so much WTF going on, I can’t chronicle it all. Like when Jonah’s maybe-grandmother is shot in her home and the shooter flees. Jonah races downstairs 3 seconds after it happens and starts screaming “HELP! HELP!!!!” Wouldn’t you be a little bit worried that maybe the person who just shot your grandma is nearby? And if they hear that someone else is in the house, they might come back to kill you too?
There’s no sense of people acting realistic in this or any situation.
Like the fact that Jonah is this lame little nerd who also happens to be a hardcore drug dealer. Or that when things go badly, he goes to this street gang that, I swear to god, was plucked right out of the movie Warriors, as if that’s the writer’s only exposure to the 70s. I was half expecting them to put on roller skates and start dancing around at some point. It was a parody of a gang to everyone but the writer.
In order to get the gang to help him, he offers them all his weed. Right at the moment, the cops show up, see Jonah holding all the weed, and arrest him (there was no setup to how they knew to show up here right at this moment of course). I’m thinking to myself, “Is that the only reason the writer made him a drug-dealer? Is so he could put this plot point in there where Jonah gets arrested and has to get bailed out by the Nazi hunter?” Look, I get it. Sometimes you place things in your plot to get your characters from point A (where you have them) to point B (where you need them). But you should never ever do so in a way that betrays the character.
Which takes me back to this Jordan Peele thing. Why isn’t he promoting this? Well, after I watched the show, I checked to see who wrote it. I saw the name “David Weil.” “I know that name from somewhere,” I thought. And I did a quick Scriptshadow search. When the results came back, EVERYTHING MADE SENSE. Weil is the writer who broke in with that abomination of a screenplay, “Moonfall!”
clip from my review of the script…
I’ll tell you the moment where I officially gave up on Moonfall. It’s when Hart and Cassie visit Dawn’s therapist to ask her if Dawn was acting strangely in the days leading up to her death. The therapist says Dawn was fine, but the two later go in and steal the therapist’s files on her.
In the files, there are a few dates mentioned in Dawn’s sessions. That’s when Cassie realizes – wait! These aren’t dates. This is code! Dawn’s trying to tell us something! So Cassie turns the dates into numbers (i.e. June 6, 2037 becomes 6062037) and realizes that these dates are – stay with me now – COORDINATES! So they now have to find those coordinates on the moon and dig up the clue Dawn left!
Okay, so let me get this straight here. Dawn, our murder victim, sensed that something bad was going to happen to her. So, in order to help her future investigators solve her murder, she decided to secretly work in a series of benign dates during her therapy sessions, which she assumed her therapist would then write down in her notes, that the police would later steal those notes, would look through them, notice the dates, think to convert them into numbers, figure out that those dates were actually moon coordinates, that they were to then dig up.
[end of clip]
To this day, I still have no idea how that screenplay became a thing. It was set on the moon and one of the featured scenes was a storm. THE MOON DOESN’T HAVE WEATHER. Cooler heads prevailed cause the movie never got made. But somehow he snuck this Nazi thing through the system. I know Peele is a big World War 2 Nazi buff. He made several sketches about Nazis in his comedy sketch show, Key and Peele. So maybe he was blinded by the possibilities and signed on. But when he finally saw the product, he realized, “If I don’t take my name off this, I’m not going to have a career in TV for long.”
If you both have Amazon Prime and a really low bar for entertainment? If things like logic, character motivation, and common sense don’t matter to you? Then by all means, check this out. It’s like a TV version of Southland Tales. I can’t believe they paid tens of millions of dollars for this. Wow.
[x] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: In a screenplay, what you want to happen doesn’t always line up with what would actually happen. And how you negotiate this ongoing issue has a huge effect on how genuine your story reads. A famous example of this occurred in the movie Terminator Salvation. We were inside a human warehouse hideout in the middle of the desert. Out of nowhere, this 5 story tall robot’s hand crashes through the ceiling and everyone starts running. As many viewers pointed out afterward – how did a 5 story tall robot sneak up on a hideout in the middle of the desert without anyone hearing it? The reason is because the writer WANTED that scene. But it didn’t line up with the REALITY of the situation, which is that there was no way for a robot to get there without being heard. So the writer just…. ignored the issue. And while every once in a while you can get away with this, it more often than not erodes the viewer’s trust in the storyteller. — Jonah running downstairs and screaming “help” seconds after someone shot his grandmother creates this dramatic response from the character that the writer WANTED. But the reality of the situation dictated the character first act with caution, making sure the killer was gone. That didn’t fit with the scene the writer wanted so he ignored it.
