I remember hearing about Hunters back when it aired on Amazon Prime in 2020. I thought the concept was interesting, I mean who doesn’t want to watch Nazis getting murdered by a vigilante group? I seemingly forgot about the show until recently. I was looking for a new show to watch and Hunters popped up on my radar. I went into watching Hunters with little to no expectations and I’m happy to say that Hunters is one of my favorite shows I watched this year.

Hunters opens with Jonah Heidelbaum (played by Logan Lerman) as he lives in New York with his grandmother, Ruth (played by Jeannie Berlin). In the middle of the night, Jonah goes downstairs and hears Ruth talking with someone and before Jonah can figure out who, Ruth is shot and killed. Jonah originally believes it was a robbery until after the funeral when he goes through Ruth’s personal belongings. It’s revealed that Ruth was partnering with a group of Nazi Hunters led by Meyer Offerman (played by Al Pacino). While Ruth wanted to protect Jonah from the Hunters, Jonah wants in. He’s quickly recruited and while he’s skeptical, he begins to realize that Nazis have been escaping justice for far too long.

I like how Hunters blends history with fiction. Simon Wiesenthal, who was an actual Nazi Hunter, appears in the show. The show references Operation Paperclip which was the secretive US government operation that brought German scientists and engineers to the US. I couldn’t imagine how difficult that would be to find out that the US recruited Nazis to work with them. It’s vile. These are war criminals who aided and abeded the Nazi party and they get a free pass to live in the US because they are smart? In the second season of Hunters, most of the season takes place in South America and when I looked up some of the Nazis that were brought to justice in history, a lot of them hid in South America. I thought it made the series more compelling that it pulled from actual history even though yes, a lot of this is still fictional.

Another thing I liked about Hunters was it had this comic book feel to the show. The hunters feel like a superhero team even though they don’t have superpowers. The intro to the show shows the characters as action figures on a chessboard moving to get in front of the Nazis. I don’t normally look up interviews with the cast or the producers, but I found myself curious as to the inspiration behind the show. In an interview with creator, David Weil, he mentions being inspired by his grandmother being a holocaust survivor and the lack of representation of Jewish superheroes. When I think about this, I don’t know any superheroes who are Jewish in comics or if there are Jewish superheroes, this isn’t highlighted much. When I read this interview by David, I felt it made a lot of sense as to why Hunters was made the way it was.

You know when you watch a show and there’s a character who is awful and evil? I think Cersei from Game of Thrones comes to mind. In Hunters that character is Travis Leich (played by Greg Austin). Travis is a white supremacist who gets recruited into helping the Nazis in the US. He was THE WORST. He’s a Nazi, so this is a given, but everything he did, it sent a shiver down my spine. There were times where he was unhinged and some of the scenes that he was in were hard to watch. This show had a great cast and I found each hunter stood out to me with their own back story and what motivates them to hunt Nazis. The Markowitz’s (played by Saul Rubinek and Carol Kane) are a married couple in the Hunters and their back story episode, I was crying. For a show that only has 18 episodes, I felt it was easy to get attached to them.

Hunters was a show I was compelled to keep watching. I don’t normally watch multiple episodes of a show for hours on end, but Hunters was the exception. I’m sad that this show doesn’t have more seasons. Hunters can be streamed on Amazon Prime.