‘The Hunting Party’ – A Left of Center Procedural

A high-concept crime procedural about a small team of investigators who are assembled to track down and capture the most dangerous killers our country has ever seen, all of whom have just escaped from a top-secret prison that’s not supposed to exist.

The Hunting Party is a refreshing take on the procedural, puzzle box thriller paired nicely with edge-of-your-seat character arcs from episode to episode. The show comes from co-showrunners JJ Bailey and Jake Coburn, who both recently spoke with Script about how they initially creatively linked up, the importance of a balanced writers’ room, drawing from real-life fears and cases. Plus, JJ shares his story on breaking in, and both share great advice on getting your foot in the door as a TV writer.

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Sadie Dean: Were you pulling from your own worst nightmares, or has this idea been kind of festering for you for a while, JJ?

JJ Bailey: Well, it actually came from mutual interests between Jake and I. We were sort of set up on what we like to call our blind date from the studio. We had both worked with Universal in the past, and they thought we would hit it off, and they set us up with a Zoom. And what was intended to be maybe a 30-minute get-to-know-you turned into this sort of two-hour brainstorming session where it became clear we both wanted to do the same things, and we really got along, and we liked a lot of the same stuff.

And we both were really interested in doing sort of this procedural that was a little left of center. We both really are fascinated by serial killer stories and the people who go after them. But we also both really gravitate towards larger scope stories. And the idea of weaving in a conspiracy thriller into a case of the week procedural was really exciting for us.

The first sort of germ of the idea came out of that first conversation. I mean, we were sort of spitballing it pretty quickly, and then obviously we took a lot of time after that to really shape it out. But honestly, it really came from just this mutual interest from Jake and I, which was when you get that spark with someone, and obviously we've worked together now for like, almost three years, Jake, I think?

Jake Coburn: Yeah, our meeting was in January of 2022.

JJ: Wow. I gotta say, I think I sort of won the lottery with Jake a little bit. These sort of things can go any direction, you know, and to meet someone like Jake where it's creatively, we see very eye to eye. We like the same stuff. I think Jake pushes me in sort of the right directions. And it's become more than just a great collaboration. Jake and I are great friends now, which is so gratifying as well.

Jake: He's trying to make me cry. That's what he's trying to do. His goal for today is, ‘I'm going to make him cry.’

JJ: I get sappy. [laughs]

Jake: I would echo everything he said. It’s hard to describe why writers or storytellers vibe with each other. If you watched two people on a basketball court, why do they have a connection and know when to move? Or playing music together, you can kind of sit down and play a guitar with somebody else. And sometimes it feels like you've played with this person for 20 years, even though you've just started. I think we had that sort of instant connection where we're sort of like, ‘Oh, our brains work well together. We complement each other, we're aiming for the same things.’

I think one of the things that we both really wanted out of this was a show that was fun to watch. And obviously, when we say serial killers and fun...we mean fun in the right way. Silence of the Lambs is a fun movie. It's energizing, it's adrenalizing, it's engaging. We didn't want to do a show that was overly dark or sort of sad or grim, which are tones that completely make sense in the context of serial killers. We wanted to do something that felt a little bit heightened. Bruckheimer is maybe not the right comp, but when you talk about a movie like Con Air, there is a fun, heightened quality to those bad guys. I think we're both kind of like, ‘let's explore that’ and sort of see where that goes.

Sadie: And it works. There is intrigue. It's interesting. It makes you think. It makes you sympathetic with the characters, and weirdly, with some of the serial killers too. And everyone has motivation. Building off this cast of characters from the agents to the escaped serial killers, I’d love to talk about your writers’ room and the types of voices you were looking for to build upon what you two had already set up.

Jake: Forgive me for the sports metaphors, because now I'm going to do my second in this conversation. When you're putting together a staff, it's a little bit like fielding a baseball team. You're not looking for all the same people. You are looking for different levels of skill at different things and you're trying to kind of find that right balance of extroverts and introverts, people who love to write versus people who love to pitch, people who are flexible, people who are good mentors to younger writers. You're kind of looking for all of these different things. I've heard it described as throwing a dinner party where you're trying to figure out, ‘How will all of these people work together?’

And I think one of the things that is sort of really interesting on this show, is that, like certain shows are hard to write but easy to break. Certain shows are easier to write and harder to break. And it just kind of depends on how they kind of lay out. And I think one of the things about this show is because you know who the bad guy is from the beginning, this is not a police procedural mystery where you're like, ‘Oh, let me figure out who really killed the person.’ We know the bad guy is. We know who we're hunting.

It's all about the devious psychology of who they were, what happened to them in the pit, who they are now, and why do they want what they want? Why are they going after what they're going after? And so, the plot of it and the psychology of it is quite complex, and has proven to be in many ways, the most gratifying, but also the most challenging part of the show for us.

We've really been leaning on writers who are good with story. It sounds funny to say that, because I think people don't necessarily divide skills into different groups, but you can have writers that are beautiful, beautiful draft writers, and that's really where they thrive. And then you can have writers who are just amazing in the room, and they write a really good draft, but you want them in the room as much as anything. We're sort of finding that right balance.

Sadie: In terms of the research aspect that goes into a show like this, especially from the psychological standpoint for each individual character, what kind of resources were you pulling from to possibly borrowing from other infamous serial killers?

JJ: Yeah, we definitely used inspiration from real serial killers. To Jake's point earlier of wanting the show to be the fun version of this, we didn't want to do right down the middle of real serial killers, or stick terribly closely to a real serial killer story. We want to sort of have the freedom to invent our own things, but we definitely used real cases as jumping off points. And oftentimes we would find ourselves exploring some interesting or strange treatments that could have been done in the pit, and then sort of doing the research into it, ‘Wouldn't it be weird if they did something kind of like this? Because it seems like that would help this.’ And then we start looking into what can we find that is sort of near that? And then we get the right terminology and then it sort of influences it, and it steers us a bit.

But I think we primarily started from a place of talking about our own personal fears. And you know this idea that when you really start mining your own experience or your own fears, as personal as they feel, they tend to end somewhere far more universal. A lot of people are afraid of the same things, and it feels a lot more honest when you do it from that place. And then from there, go look at textbooks or research cases that maybe have something to do with it.

Episode Four aired recently, and it was about a doctor who was killing patients, essentially. There are real cases of that. We were talking about things that feel very frightening to us are, a lot of times, are people that you inherently put your trust in, like a doctor, and when that trust gets violated, that's terrifying to us, because I don't know what's in that syringe you just gave me, you know? [laughs] And so, starting from there, and then going to look at those real cases and sort of see why were these people doing that, how did they do that? And then it informs the idea that we sort of already started with, and that was a lot of our sort of our process in the room.

Jake: And I think something as simple as, like, Uber Eats, Postmates, whatever you want to call it. We haven't done this episode, but we talk a lot about the idea that person could poison you very easily, and how vulnerable you are with something as simple as Postmates.

JJ: You don't think twice about the stranger bringing your food.

Jake: Right! We just sit there and we eat it. And things like that are interesting jumping off points for us, because it's something like he was saying super universal and in a way, it activates you, because you can connect to it.

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Sadie: And activate is definitely the key word of what you feel after watching the show. In terms of the shows act structure, which is broken down into five acts. The fifth act closes out with, not necessarily a cliffhang, but more of a hook to bring you back for the next episode. You can talk about the importance of that button in the structure of the show?

Jake: It's a question that is a big part of television development right now in terms of network television, as well as some streaming procedural stuff. But I think it all comes back to how we view shows. How we view shows really determines how shows also get made, right? When you look at a show like SVU,  you can watch an SVU episode in any order you want, at any point. You can go to season 17, and then season two, and the serialization is very, very slow and granular. So, you're able to really dive in anywhere you want. That's the most procedural, closed ended storytelling, network model.

And then you've got things on the other end that are maybe 20% serialized. And something like Mind Hunter, a show we talk about like, there is case of the week, there is killer of the episode, but then you have all these sort of personal storylines. And personal storylines, generally speaking, serialized storylines are amazing, and we love them, but they also present a bit of an issue for a studio or a network that wants to have a show that can run in any order, right? You have to find that right balance of, ‘OK, we're going to do strong enough cases that take up enough of every episode that someone can just jump in and enjoy that.’ But we also have to find enough serialized story so that we keep people feeling like they have to kind of sit on the edge of their seats. 

Serialized bookends is becoming more and more popular because, if you look at it algorithmically, when you're watching a Netflix episode, they love to leave on a cliffhanger, and you're sitting there and you're looking at your watch and you're like, 'Oh, it's 9:45. I really want to keep watching.' And that phenomenon is not by accident, it's designed to encourage binge and to encourage that sort of weekend viewing. You're not just doing what you want to do. You're also working in concert with the studio network to create a product that makes sense for the platform that it is on.

Sadie: With you two co-showrunning this show, apart from the melding of your two minds, what do you two divvy up, from staffing and beyond?

JJ: It starts with hiring the right people and good people, and people that you're excited to sit in a room with all day, every day, because that's what it is at the start - you're just sitting around a table talking for eight hours, or whatever it is. And that could be exhausting with the wrong people or with a fly in the ointment. And something Jake really helped us out with was when we were setting up our room, he's been working in this industry for a long time, he knows a lot of people, and he was able to call people that he knew and had worked with before and could vouch for and say, 'This is a person who not only is going to be great in the room, or great on paper, but is going to be a good person in the room. They're not going to cause you problems. They're going to be coming to work energetic and wanting to do the job.’ And also matching personalities. That was super, super helpful.

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But I would say for us, one of the things that helped was - I can imagine a situation where two show runners could be problematic - but Jake and I sort of found ourselves in a position where there was sort of a Venn diagram with the things that we really liked, and there are outlier things that I like, outlier things that he likes, but there's this overlap in the middle. It was sort of like someone would pitch something, would be talking about something, and when it landed, that middle part, you see Jake and I both kind of perk up and, 'Yeah, let's go that way.' And that was usually when we knew we were on to something is when we both really felt it. I think it was rare that one of us really had to champion something to convince the other one.

Jake: I've been lucky to study under some of the best in the game. And working with somebody like Greg Berlanti on a show like Arrow, where you had basically three people credited as creating it, and three people, essentially were the brain trust behind, kind of running it. And you would watch all the different minds working, but then you would see a moment when all three would light up. Or if it's Josh [Schwartz] and Stephanie Savage on Gossip Girl, when they both light up and you would see these moments - that convergence moment is a very, very specific thing. And if you watch really good people let them teach you how to follow that process - you can kind of borrow it. Every successful showrunning strategy I have is taken directly from, Josh and Stephanie, Greg, and Julie Plec. 

Generally speaking, I think I probably do slightly more managerial stuff at times, whereas JJ is much more involved in really, sometimes perfecting details. He'll go super into like a prop or a wardrobe choice or a setting - he is very much the visionary of the show, and my job is to support that and to help actualize that. And so, we do balance each other out, but it's like I said in the beginning, you want to find somebody that you just kind of vibe with, and if you vibe with them, then a lot of things go kind of naturally from there. And if they don't, your show dies. It just doesn't end up working because you're fighting and the ideas are clashing, and egos get involved, and all that stuff.

Sadie: Any general advice you may have for TV writers interested in writing crime dramas, procedurals, maybe tropes to avoid or maybe embrace, especially in the TV landscape that is continually evolving?

JJ: For me, and this is probably just more partly a taste thing, there's some really good procedurals that have been done for a long time, like Law and Order, Criminal Minds. And they do what they do very well. And I think if your goal is to stand out, I think doing something different. The puzzle is such a fun part of it, but finding a way to come at that puzzle a little bit differently, which is sort of what we set out to do with this show. A procedural is essentially a puzzle, but we're going to come at it a little bit left of center, and that helped us just sort of differentiate.

But then from there, I think it's all about characters, because you can have a new puzzle every week, and it can be awesome, but if I don't love who's solving the puzzle every week, I'm not going to watch the show. And so, I think really taking the time to figure out your characters, but not just creating compelling, interesting characters, but thinking about the why this character for this show, I think really is something that I spent a lot of time just in my own brain thinking about.

Jake: Tell the story of how you got signed, because I think it's a fairly inspirational story.

JJ: I spent a long time trying to break in, and couldn't break in. And I got a manager for a little bit. Nothing was happening. So, I fired him and tried to get some new representation. Nothing was happening. Came to the point where my wife and I, we were having our first son, and I was basically like, ‘I don't think I can ask my family to go through this.’ I wasn't making money. It was a tough time. And I basically was like, I'm going to go talk to somebody about moving to San Diego, where I'm from, and maybe getting a job down there. And I think this has played its course. And my wife was the one who actually convinced me to give it like six more months.

And meanwhile, I submitted two scripts to a couple screenwriting competitions - and just a quick lesson in the subjectivity of this industry, the scripts both each won a different competition, but I entered both in both and it was sort of like script A won competition A, script B won competition B, but in the other competitions, they both were out in the first round. It was clear lesson, like it depends on who's reading it when, and you can be a good writer and just the wrong person reads it at the wrong time, and they just don't like it.

But all that to say, through one of the competitions, I met my manager, and then he opened a lot of doors to me, and it was about six months to the day, just about from that conversation with my wife that I sold my first project to Universal, and then it was like, 'All right, we're here. We're sticking it out.' And from there, I was fortunate enough to continue that momentum, and now I'm here.

The little nugget that I love telling now too, is where I used to live when I was having that conversation, I was like, ‘I'm giving up. I'm done.’ I used to walk across the street to this Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf every day to write, and it was on the corner of Santa Monica and Beverly Glen, and that's where I lived. And there was this billboard on the corner, and every few weeks it was a new show that was up there. And I would always look at it and think, 'Oh, man, that's pretty cool someone's got their show. What would that be like?' And when The Hunting Party came out, we got a billboard on that corner. And so, I took my family to go see it. We took pictures in front of it, and it was a very, sort of full circle moment. It was very cool.

Sadie: That is really cool and very sweet. Jake any advice you’d like to add for those TV writers out there?

Jake: I would say, write a lot of specs. Like JJ said, it's so subjective. I meet a lot of writers who are perfecting this one script. And it is a beautiful thing about a bicycle company in 1975 in Akron, Ohio - you know what I mean? And it is so meticulously done, and it's awesome. But in a certain way, what you want is a ton of stuff. Be kind of almost careless in following ideas, writing things, putting it out there, because every time you put something out there is an opportunity for you to get a response.

So, I would say, don't be precious and follow big ideas. Because big ideas are to a certain extent, big ideas are the currency of Hollywood. There's a saying that someone once said to me, sort of a mentor figure, and he's like, 'Hollywood doesn't buy writing. They buy ideas.' That's not 100% true, but there's a lot of truth to it. And certainly, in the television industry, I think it's probably more true…And whatever that idea is, putting a bunch of ideas out there, you will find, hopefully, somebody that resonates with one of these ideas and can give you the break that you need.

Last thing I'll add is, I think Zoom, while it has hurt certain aspects of the writing room process has been a great democratizer of you don't need $20,000 to move to LA and get a car and get an apartment and get all these things. You can be wherever you happen to be and start getting those breaks. I think that's really good. And something that kind of a silver lining of the pandemic is that I think it's easier now to be a TV writer outside of California.

New episodes of The Hunting Party air on Monday on NBC and stream on Tuesday on Peacock.