Critic Reviews

The conspiracy thickens without ever grabbing you--mostly because Flynn is so, so boring. The show tries to add some juice to his story line by hinting that Abby might be an alien herself, but good luck trying to muster up the energy for caring about that. ... Hunters does have some things going for it: Britne Oldford, who steals scenes as the conflicted agent. ... Speaking of watchable aliens, the main baddie McCarthy is another treat. Julian McMahon plays him with a deranged sense of fun.

Bad and dark and confusing things ensue, but the human characters are so completely unengaging.

Much of Hunters seems like torture porn. McMahon overacts as the unhinged Hunter who seems to want to destroy humanity but is taking the long road to armageddon. Phillips is just miscast as humanity’s best hope.

There are a lot of ambient and random sounds in the episodes, which makes things seem more ominous than any tension generated by the story. Apart from that musical wrinkle, Hunters is overly familiar, essentially a generic crime show in a sci-fi case.

Flynn, unfortunately, is just another scruffy male protagonist of a type that is all over television. Of his new E.T.U. colleagues, only Allison gets your attention. That may not be enough. Hunters seems as if it might be too convoluted and coy to be worth the mental energy.

It panders to [its audience] so insultingly that most probably wouldn’t mind an episode of Warehouse 13, even at its absolute kookiest, in the place of this show’s early installments. Hunters isn’t part of the network’s identity crisis: it is the network’s identity crisis.

Utterly generic, conceptually cynical and instantly forgettable.

Unfortunately, Hunters carries about as much intellectual heft as a YouTube conspiracy video.

The action is sluggish and perfunctory, with most encounters playing out as shadowy warehouse chases where tension is equated with lack of situational awareness by the heroes. The Hunters themselves are a nondescript jumble of alien races we’ve seen many times before.

Nothing that follows [the] intriguing opening manages to be half as interesting; a generic tone permeates the show.