Drama
The Pitt
Max’s hospital drama ‘The Pitt’ strives to be medically accurate. While a noble goal, this show comes with a whole lot of content, too.
Bex thought she was out of the game for good. Her past had other ideas.
Bex—full name, Rebecca Henderson—has a unique ability to read a crime scene. She was so good at it, in fact, that it made her a star profiler at the FBI — until a crisis involving her mentor and a case gone wrong soured her on the special agent life, and she left it without looking back.
But a talent like Bex couldn’t hang up the FBI windbreaker forever. It isn’t long before the United States Attorney General comes knocking on her door with a problem and a proposition. The problem: a top-secret underground prison called the Pit has been compromised, and dozens of mass murderers are on the loose. The proposition: Bex assembles a team to track down those escaped criminals and put them back where they belong.
Seems simple enough. Eventually, though, Bex is faced with the inevitable question: How was the Pit compromised the first place? All signs point to it being an inside job, which makes deciding who to trust very, very tricky.
Oh, and as it turns out, Bex’s father was one of the serial killers that escaped the Pit. See? Simple!
It quickly becomes obvious why these killers were locked in an underground box. Each episode centers on a criminal that Bex’s team is tasked with hunting down. These range from an environmentalist who believes all humans should be exterminated to a loner who hides under women’s beds and injects them with a paralytic, pretending they’re a happy couple as the victim slowly dies. It sometimes feels like each episode challenges itself to be more disturbing than the last.
On the bright side, the restrictions of network TV mean you won’t find egregious gore or sexual content here. Some fights take place, and you may see one or two mild gunshot wounds, but it’s all much tamer than anything you’d face on a streaming service. The real issues are thematic, as each episode invents a new stomach-turning way for serial killers to murder their victims.
But if while watching The Hunting Party you feel an even deeper sense of discomfort, you’re not alone. Most of the criminals hunted by Bex and her team have serious psychological issues, or their twisted natures stems from unaddressed traumas in their childhoods. Obviously, this doesn’t excuse any of their actions, but it still feels a bit uncomfortable for their illnesses — some of which are faced by real people in the real world — to be sensationalized for the thrills of a crime drama.
The series does stress the value of life, as the team does their very best to capture the killers alive. In one episode, Bex stops her target from taking his own life; in another, Bex’s teammate stops her from choking a killer to death. But it doesn’t do much to help the whole situation from feeling…well, icky.
The Hunting Party is far from the most gruesome crime drama on television. In fact, in terms of violence and sexuality, it’s fairly tame. But this reviewer wouldn’t recommend trying it out while settling in for a lunch break. The show’s increasingly inventive ways of killing—and its general premise—may ruin your appetite pretty fast.
(Editor’s Note: Plugged In is rarely able to watch every episode of a given series for review. As such, there’s always a chance that you might see a problem that we didn’t. If you notice content that you feel should be included in our review, send us an email at letters@pluggedin.com, or contact us via Facebook or Instagram, and be sure to let us know the episode number, title and season so that we can check it out. )
In the Season 2 premiere, Bex’s team hunts down a serial killer known as “the Boogeyman” before he can claim another victim.
Before being captured and sent to the Pit, Ron “the Boogeyman” Simms, the featured killer in this episode, exclusively targeted women. He hid under their beds and injected them with a paralytic, so they were aware of everything happening around them but could not move or speak. He would then pretend to “date” them by watching movies and chatting as the paralytic slowly killed the victims.
After escaping from the Pit, Ron tries to form genuine connections with women he meets on dating apps, but when he reveals his past to them, they become frightened, and he’s “forced” to paralyze and kill them. Multiple photos of his victims’ bodies are shown. None of this is graphic, either violently or sexually, but it’s certainly disturbing to watch.
Ron also keeps his therapist locked in a barn wearing a rabbit costume, as rabbits were part of the therapy he was given in the Pit. When Bex tracks him down, Ron shoots the therapist in the foot; a bloody gunshot wound is briefly shown. Another wound appears when Ron is shot in the shoulder. Bex and Ron fight hand-to-hand, and Bex nearly chokes him to death before her teammate stops her.
On one of his dates, Ron enjoys a bottle of wine with his future victim. The wine later becomes a clue, and Bex investigates by visiting a wine shop. The team drinks beer to celebrate catching Ron.
One of Ron’s dates jokes about him wanting to “get lucky.”
“H—” is used twice.
Lauren Cook is serving as a 2021 summer intern for the Parenting and Youth department at Focus on the Family. She is studying film and screenwriting at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. You can get her talking for hours about anything from Star Wars to her family to how Inception was the best movie of the 2010s. But more than anything, she’s passionate about showing how every form of art in some way reflects the Gospel. Coffee is a close second.
Max’s hospital drama ‘The Pitt’ strives to be medically accurate. While a noble goal, this show comes with a whole lot of content, too.
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