“Hunters” (2020), the new show by Amazon Prime Video, follows a group of Nazi hunters in the United States. It is set in 1977, in New York, where there are many Nazi soldiers hidden within the American society and in powerful positions, who are planning on creating a Fourth Reich. The hunters are a group of Jewish people who look for Nazis in order to bring them down and stop their plan.
The show has, as one of its executive producers, Academy Award winner screenwriter Jordan Peele, best known for “Get Out!”, “Us” and “BlacKkKlansman”. It is also the first time we see Academy Award winner actor Al Pacino (“The Godfather”) on the small screen, he plays the leader of the group. On the cast they also have other known names, like Logan Lerman (“Percy Jackson and the Lighting Thief”), as Jonah, the new kid who joins the group after his grandmother, a friend of Meyer’s, is murdered, Josh Radnor (“How I Met Your Mother”), Jerrika Hinton (“Grey’s Anatomy”) and Kate Mulvany (“The Great Gatsby”).
But why are shows like Amazon Prime’s “Hunters” important nowadays? Here are a couple of reasons:
- Because we can’t forget what happened in the past
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The show was created by David Weil, a Jew who “wanted to tell a story about Jewish characters getting justice and vengeance for other Jewish characters”, as he said in an interview with Business Insider. He also said the show is a love letter to his grandmother, who was a Jewish survivor, and he talks about how it is up to the descendents of these survivors to continue telling the stories of the Holocaust, and everything that happened after, to the newer generations, so it won’t be forgotten.
And by creating a story about Jewish characters for the Jewish people, Weil already does something that isn’t very common but is very important, which is the representation of Jewish people in shows and movies. He actually wanted to create the Jewish superheroes, or Jew-per heroes as they say on the show, that he always wanted to see on screen as a kid.
- But we also need to focus on the present
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“Hunters” is not only important because of its portrayal of Jewish people, but the story it tells is one that resonates very well with the world right now. BBC describes it as “a show about how nice old liberal Western democracies are never far away from fascism”.
But Nazis living within our society seems a little stretched out, doesn’t it? Well, we can’t say for sure that we still have Nazi officials living among us, but we do know their ideas are still very much alive, for example in the Neo-Nazi movement, or in the white supremacist one as well. And we can observe the effect of them and their thoughts in events such as the supermarket massacre in Hoboken in 2019, the Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh in 2018, or the violent manifestation of white supremacy in Charlottesville in 2017.
With that, we can compare the intolerance that Nazis have on the show, and had in real life, to our current moment, when we have the rise of prejudice, racism, xenophobia, homofobia, and all kinds of intolerance towards other people and minorities. Which is why telling these kind of stories is incredibly essential. So, overall, we can say that “Hunters” is about the urgent threat of domestic white nationalism, something that isn’t very far away from us.
And telling stories about Jews, the Holocaust, or what would happen if we still had a fascist government, is necessary today, but it doesn’t happen as often, or at least not in a good way, and that is why shows like “Hunters” are so significant. Especially because they raise important conversations that are very much needed in today’s political climate. - Representation and diversity
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And yet, there is another reason why “Hunters” is an important show, especially to the Jewish people: the diversity in its cast, characters and storylines, which is something we don’t see very often on the big and small screens. For instance, all of the Jewish characters on the show, except for Al Pacino, are played by Jewish actors. The show also has plenty of representation of people of color and queer people, like Millie (Jerrika Hinton), an FBI agent who is a queer black woman and one of the leads of the series.
And having a diverse cast, characters and storylines, is very meaningful today and extremely important because, according to Carlos Cortes, a historian who wrote the book “The Children Are Watching: How the Media Teach About Diversity”, what minorities see on the screen influences not only how other people see them, but how they see themselves. And that is why shows such as “Sex Education” (Netflix), “One Day at a Time” (Netflix/Pop TV) and “On My Block” (Netflix) are very popular.
- Other shows like “Hunters”
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“The Man in the High Castle” (Amazon Prime Video), that imagines America as if Germany, the Nazis, and Japan had won World War II, and now the world is divided into two sections: The Greater Nazi Reich in the east and the Japanese Pacific States in the west.
“Watchmen” (HBO) focuses on violent events made by a white supremacist group in Tulsa in 2019 and their fight with the police.
And the forthcoming HBO show “The Plot Against America”, based on Philip Roth’s book with the same name, which imagines what the world would look like if Charles Lindbergh, a fascist, antisemit and xenophobic populist, had won the American presidential election in 1940.
In the end, “Hunters”, and others shows like it, are important for many reasons, the diversity in its story and even the cast, the story itself, the way it portrays the Nazis and how it tells the story of the Holocaust to other generations. Because it makes us see history through different perspectives, ones that we are not really familiar with, and makes us wonder what is fiction and what is reality – or what could become reality if we don’t do anything. Besides that, the show is on a streaming platform, Amazon Prime Video, which easens its access and widens its reach, making it available to way more people.
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The article above was edited by Laura Okida.
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