hunted

I mentioned last week that I watched a lot of stuff that I'd recorded.

This included quite a few documentaries, but also a few drama series, one of which was hunted.  I'd been under the impression that hunted as a single series, which is to say that the adventure was self-contained in the 8 episodes they showed.

It turned out this wasn't entirely the case, and I found myself quite annoyed by that.  Now to be fair, in some ways it was - the main plot of the series that revolved around what the team were doing in regards to a Pakistani dam that was being sold did resolve.  However, there was also a whole other element to the story about the main character Sam and this didn't really resolve.

Having looked the series up on wikipedia it's clear that this was intentional - they clearly wanted to make this something akin to 24 or homeland with an ongoing plot across all the series but with each individual series sort of self-contained.  I guess that's fair enough, but the problem is the first episode and about half o the second episode were essentially devoted to the long-term plot.  This therefore set me up for much more of a resolution on that plot than we got.

What's more annoying, though, is that the BBC has said they won't fund a second series.  The production company has indicated they are still looking to do a second series, but it will have to be smaller without the beeb's cash.  That could work as the production could easily be ramped down (fewer foreign episodes, for example) and still contain a good story.

Also, and I think this was probably one of the things that hurt the series, fewer episodes.  8 episodes was a lot and there was a lot of padding in the series.  They could easily have skipped whole chunks of it without any real impact on the story.

I've probably given the impression there that I want it to continue, but to some extent I think that's a bit more of a reflection of how maddening I found it not actually being told what was going on properly, even though the main character had clearly figured big chunks of stuff out.  In particular she was having half remembered flash back to her childhood and we saw she properly remembered these, but we never got any sort of explanation.

Anyway, point is I'm not entirely sure it was a good series, as such.  It relied very heavily on tropes and clichés - the main bad guy was this cockney gangster pastiche, for example.  Also the violence was so over the top it became almost silly.  I actually fast forwarded through quite a lot of the fights as they were just so overblown it was boring.  They also stretched credibility - Melissa George is very skinny compared to the beefcakes she was supposedly thrashing to within and inch of their lives.

Also London is apparently a place where people are murdered left, right and centre but the one bent cop is all you need to cover it up and the media doesn't pay attention.

A lot of it was kinda daft, really.