This Dog Won't Hunt

I've been watching the new Amazon mini-series Hunters, created by David Weil.  It's a big deal in that it stars Al Pacino in his first regular TV role.  It's a small deal in that it's terrible.  I've given up after three episodes.

Set in 1977, it's about an underground group of Nazi hunters going after an equally secret group of Nazis who have infiltrated America.  Meanwhile, there's an FBI agent (Jerrika Hinton) trying to figure out who's doing all this killing.

Pacino plays Meyer Offerman, survivor of the death camps, who leads the Hunters.  Fellow survivor and stalwart Ruth Heidelbaum (Jeannie Berlin), whom he knew in the camps, has recently been murdered by one of the Nazis.  Her grandson (Logan Lerman) finds out about the Hunters and joins them.

The drama is all over the place, with comic and musical interludes amidst the action.  These moments might work as relief if the writing, characters and action were better.  Instead, the show is ridiculous, even for something set at comic book level--the Hunters (including Carol Kane, Josh Radnor and Saul Rubinek) are a diverse coalition of superheroes, and the bad guys (including Lena Olin and Dylan Baker) are crude caricatures even for Nazis.

Worse, the visions of the death camps, which pop up regularly in flashback, are overdone.  There are those who claim the Holocaust shouldn't even be fictionalized, since that's a betrayal of history.  I wouldn't go that far, but when something so obscene is toyed with in this way, for cheap effect, it does leave one queasy.  And that the plot attributes horrible events in American history after WWII to Nazi conspiracy is also pretty stupid and ugly.

In addition, though I see this in so many period shows it seems almost pointless to complain, the dialogue is full of anachronistic phrases and references, not to mention political attitudes, that wouldn't be found in 1977.

Al Pacino, overacting (which is the only kind of acting he does these days) with a Jewish accent, seems to be having fun, but he's one of the few bright spots in the show.  The others don't seem able to rise above the material.

Amazon already has an excellent comic book show about a secret group in America taking on a serious threat--it's called The Boys.  Watch that instead.