Every now and then, there’s a TV show that is far more than it initially seems to be. The Hunting Party has brought us a story about hunting down serial killers, but there’s also the conspiracy of The Pit.
You see, The Pit is more than just a place to test on serial killers to see what makes them tick. There is a method to the madness, and there is something much bigger going on with The Pit itself and the prison breakout.
JJ Bailey, one of the two showrunners of the series, talked with us about the development of the series. Where did the ideas become, and just how international could this series grow?
The development of The Hunting Party
Precinct TV: I find The Pit fascinating. Where did that idea come from?
JJ Bailey: Jake Coburn, my co-showrunner, and I met through almost like a blind date. The studio worked with both of us before and thought we’d get along. So we sat down for this half-hour Zoom, which turned into two hours, and we just really wanted to work together after that. We realized we loved the same thing, and we both really wanted to do a procedural that felt different.
We really wanted to play with serial killers, but we also wanted to infuse a conspiracy angle into the procedural. We felt like marrying those two things would be really fun.
I had written a project a few years ago that involved a silo being converted into a bunker. So, we thought, what if it wasn’t a bunker? What if this was where serial killers had gone. You don’t hear much about the Ted Bundys anymore, but why is that? Maybe they’re all being housed somewhere, and it just grew out of that.
It was a lot of fun diving into the mythology of what this place could be about and why they were doing it.
PTV: The idea of treating the serial killers. There are all these types of experiments. Where did those ideas come from?
JJB: The specific ones?
PTV: Yeah, or just in general, the idea of treating serial killers and making them more dangerous.
JJB: There’s a larger purpose to the whole thing. It was sort of reverse engineered into some treatments. We wanted some of them to feel sort of benign and just weird. Like, why would you show a PSA to a serial killer? That is so bizarre! Only to then hopefully down the road, you’ll relaize that each one of these is a piece of something larger.
Generally, we come up with the serial killer first, and then we start thinking of what you would do with that person given what the writers know about the overarching mythology. That lends itself into these treatments. Then there are other times where we read about really bizarre real world psychological experiments, and we had to create our own version of it into the show.
PTV: You said you wanted something different. I get vibes of Criminal Minds, The Blacklist, and even Suicide Squad. How did you make sure you remained unique?
JJB: One of the things I think that differentiates our show in a significant way is really, unlike most procedurals, we know who the killer is from the get-go. Our team knows who they’re after right away. So we’re not necessarily solving the “whoduntit.” We’re more doing the why done it, and what’s changed now?
That shift on it can allow us to not only dive into some interesting psychology stuff, but it allows us to live in our killer’s point of view more than a typical show. When you start a prime procedural and you don’t know who the killer is, you have to wait until the reveal in the final act. You don’t get to spend much time with the killer. You can talk about and theorize about, but you don’t get to see them doing their thing. In our show, we really wanted to spend time with them and see what they were up to.
We’re so fortunate to work with some fantastic actors to bring those roles to life. I think that is one thing that really sets our show apart and allows us to do some fresh things, because we’re playing it open.
MORE: The Hunting Party season 1, episode 3 recap and review
PTV: Are there thoughts on expanding? Maybe going international? If I was one of your serial killers, I’d be faking a passport and getting out of the country.
JJB: That’s so funny. We sort of joke about that quite a bit. We’re gonna end up chasing someone in Europe.
We do talk a lot about expanding the show. Maybe it’s not just serial killers down there. Maybe we’ll find out in some future season that there’s somebody who’s committed some other crime, or maybe there’s a serial killer from a foreign country that they didn’t know what to do with, so we brought them over to study them. I think there’s a lot of ways to expand on that.
If we expanded the manhunt to another country, that’d be interesting. How does our team navigate the politics and the legalities in another country where we’re hunting a killer who shouldn’t exist? Those are great complications that are on our radar for sure.
PTV: Melissa said she wanted somewhere in the Caribbean. But I know we always say there’s no guarantee of more seasons, but you need to plan things out in the hope that there are. How many seasons could you see The Hunting Party being?
JJB: We have four to five seasons with signposts. We don’t want to answer everything about The Pit for a long time. We want to give you enough to be satisfied but stay curious.
In terms of the serialized elements, I think it could go well beyond that. I think you know we’ve created a world where a lot more could be going on. I think the audience will find out that there’s a lot more going on down there than we thought, and I think that really allows us to expand on that. In terms of killers, we have a writer’s room of, I want to say, seven or eight people. We had two full walls just listed with ideas for serial killers. There’s no shortage.
PTV: I feel like that should be a bad thing, but it’s not.
JJB: It’s an odd thing going to work every day and thinking about this stuff! But it’s fun.
PTV: Were there any real-life serial killers you took inspiration from?
JJB: Absolutely! We tried hard to stay away from the real world. We talked about it for a bit. Maybe it would be cool for the finale to be a killer in the real world. Like, what if BTK was in The Pit? We took a step back. We didn’t want to cross that line. There are real victims out there.
As weird as this is going to sound, we wanted to deal with fun serial killers. So we want to fictionalize. We certainly take inspiration from some, though. There’s an episode coming up shortly that’s very much like Scott Peterson, but we never say that name.
The Hunting Party airs on Mondays at 10/9c on NBC. Catch up the following day on Peacock.
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