Taking hide and seek to its absolute limits, Hunted makes its return for season two on Monday, 17 July at 7:30 pm on 10 and 10 Play.
This time around there are more fugitives, more Hunters, and a whole lot more adrenaline as the pairs work to evade capture for 21 days – those who manage to outsmart the hunters and make it to a final extraction point will win a share of the $100,000 prize money.
Mediaweek caught up with Hunted EP Tim Ali, to ask about the show’s second time on the run, and whether this season’s fugitives learned from the mistakes of last year’s participants.
“There were no drastic changes,” Ali says of bringing the second season two to life after the success of the first season. “This series was about allowing the principal cast to just get back into it and do what they do best – they’re brilliant at what they do, and it was about giving them another crack. Naturally, we saw the communication get better, the relationships get better, as a team it was more cohesive doing it a second time.”
Tim Ali
Hunted was the biggest new show of 2022, crashing onto the scene with 549,000 metro overnight viewers tuning into the finale, and the final extraction drawing a crowd of 602,000. When going back for round two, Ali laughs that “I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t thinking about it!”
“We’ve got a great production team, and all we really had to do was just trust in the format. The gameplay and the thrill of the chase are what make this show so captivating to our audiences, so we just had to trust the process.
“The main thing for us was that we made sure we put the right fugitive cast together, that would really push the boundaries of the game and test the hunters. Then, from the Hunters’ point of view, we made sure that we had growth and evolution in HQ, that we were giving the audiences something new to discover in terms of technology and techniques and strategy.”
When putting together that cast of fugitives, the show added one extra team this year, which Ali says was due to having “an overwhelming casting call” with “so many amazing characters to pick from”.
“As with most shows we cast, we’re looking for a true cross-section of society. We want to bring in and represent lots of different types of people that are out there – and the beauty of this show is that anyone can play. You don’t have to be super fit, or super fast, or super academic, because at the end of the day, at the heart of the show, you have to make the right decision under a huge amount of pressure. It doesn’t matter what walk of life you come from, that’s a huge challenge.”
Of course, with one extra team of fugitives, there have been some changes to the Hunters team as well.
“To make it fair, we’ve added an extra Ground Hunter team this year as well – team Echo,” says Ali. “We also have senior principal analyst Leigha Fraser, she’s fantastic, she has 16 years of experience as a local law enforcement analyst. Her strength is being able to put the time into studying relationships and really connecting the dots on a micro level, putting the full picture together of what the fugitives may do next. She then works with Ben and the Chief on what the next move should be.”
For those about to take off on the run, Mediaweek puts it to Ali that they have an advantage over the fugitives of last year – they’ve seen the first season and can learn from the mistakes of others.
“I really think it doesn’t matter how prepared you think you are for this show, it means nothing when you’re actually out there in the field and on the run,” says Ali. “Because once the stress, paranoia, and tiredness sets in, and that adrenaline starts wearing off, it’s incredibly hard to make the right decision under pressure when you have no idea how much the Hunters actually know.
“Everyone can sit home and go, ‘This is what I’d do, I’d smash that,’ but once you’re out there, it’s completely different. It might be a slight advantage, but I don’t think it really comes into it.”
21 days is a long time to be on the run, and when asked if he was ever concerned that all the fugitives would be caught before the time was up, Ali says that he actually had a different concern.
“This year I really felt the opposite – because the fugitives came in talking such a big game, I actually thought we weren’t going to catch anyone! Both sides of the fence brought their absolute A games, and it’s going to be exciting. I can’t wait for the audience to see how it plays out.”