When Lonny Flash (Josh Radnor), an out-of-work actor born Leonard Flazenstein, has to use the bathroom, he says he’s going to go “drop some chocolate dreidels into the Dead Sea.” But while the dialogue is peppered with Yiddishisms, the show has substantially less interest in engaging with Jewish moral tradition or faith. They’re not all Jewish, but the ones who are stress it so emphatically it verges on a kind of ethnic minstrelsy. There’s Roxy Jones (Tiffany Boone), a black activist with a splendiferous Afro Joe Mizushima (Louis Ozawa), a battle-scarred Vietnam veteran and Sister Harriet (Kate Mulvany), a British nun who wears a wimple and curses like a sailor. (I haven’t seen a Tarantino ripoff this labored since The Boondock Saints.) Meyer’s group is filled out with a collection of second- and third-hand caricatures, not types taken from movies but types taken from movies about movies. Weil is clearly taking his cues from, and at times slavishly imitating, Quentin Tarantino, who capped Inglourious Basterdswith the invented but cathartic killing of Adolf Hitler. Who killed Bobby Kennedy? What caused the New York City blackout? Yup, that shit really happened. (The explosives experts played by Saul Rubinek and Carol Kane are dubbed “A couple of Chabad-asses.”) And it gets more outlandish as it goes, positing not just a string of fugitive war criminals trying to stay off the radar but a vast conspiracy at every level of society. The story, in which Al Pacino’s Meyer Offerman convenes an elite squad of off-the-books Nazi killers, is deliberately over the top, complete with grindhouse-style introductions for each member of the team. Amazon’s in-episode commentary for the scene calls it “a fiction that illuminates a larger truth,” and that’s the rationale for Hunters as a whole. The second episode features a singing competition called “The Star of Buchanwald,” in which concentration-camp prisoners are shot dead for going out of tune or forgetting the words to a German song, until one remains. Hunters’ creator, David Weil, defended the scene in question, a macabre game of “human chess” between a Nazi concentration camp guard and a Jewish grandmaster, as a necessary invention, designed for “showcasing the most extreme-and representationally truthful-sadism and violence that the Nazis perpetrated against Jews and other victims.” But with the phrase Weil shoehorns in between those dashes, he gives himself a lot of leeway. Over the weekend, the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum came out against the show, proclaiming a scene in the first episode “dangerous foolishness” that “welcomes future deniers.” But despite its ostensible grounding in history and the periodic inclusion of faux-newsreel segments with titles like “Yup, That Shit Really Happened,” the series’ relationship to the past is casual at best, and arguably far worse. 1977 was the year an executioner from the Treblinka camp was identified after living in Waterbury, Connecticut for two decades. Hunters’ late-1970s setting allows it to occupy the period when Nazi hunting was still an active profession. “You thought the war was over,” he taunts her before putting a bullet in her head. With a disappointed frown, Biff pulls a gun out from under his prep table and slaughters them all: his wife, their kids, his friends, leaving the Jewish survivor for last. It couldn’t be more perfectly, almost comically American, at least until a new colleague arrives and his wife, a concentration camp survivor, identifies the man who’s been known for the last 30 years as Biff Simpson as the Butcher of Arlav, a Nazi war criminal who massacred her entire family. As Bob Seger plays on the soundtrack, the camera takes in his neatly trimmed backyard, the water gleaming blue in his swimming pool as his three children splash about, the smiling face of his blonde wife, and the undersecretary himself, tending his grill in a “Kiss the Cook” apron. It’s a beautiful summer day in Maryland, 1977, and Jimmy Carter’s Undersecretary of State is having a cookout.
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