Frank Spotnitz, of The X-Files fame, has created a new series, HUNTED, for CINEMAX and BBC One which premiers Friday, October 19 at 10:00 PM.
Melissa George is Sam Hunter, a top operative for Byzantium, a global intelligence, security agency. A great job until someone tries to kill her – someone from her own company, and that’s just the beginning of her problems.
Hunted doesn’t have any alien agendas, but it does have all the machination, twists and turns of a good tense spy story. The first season of Hunted was shot entirely on location in Europe and Northern Africa.
While at the last TCA session, creator/writer/producer Frank Spotnitz talked about his latest creation, Hunted.
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POP CULTURE ZOO: What did you learn during your years on The X-Files about creating mythology and how dense or how transparent to make it?
FRANK SPOTNITZ: When The X-Files started, the word “mythology” was not in the vocabulary to describe television, and I think we kind of stumbled upon the whole method of telling stories that way by accident, because of Gillian Anderson’s pregnancy at the end of Season 1. But I think we began to realize that you could thread clues and you could wait quite a long time. You could wait sometimes two or three years in the case of The X-Files before you picked up that thread again. And not only would people follow it, they would love your for it, because you were rewarding their loyalty and their intelligence.
But at that point, people thought television was not very sophisticated. And I realized just the opposite was true. It’s very hard to be as smart as your audience. And so it emboldened us to be very ambitious with the ideas we tried to convey. The two main things I took from The X-Files experience were: be ambitious, be as great as you can be, and trust in the intelligence of your audience. And those are the two things I thought very much about in doing Hunted.
PCZ: Why did you want to shot this in Europe and where did you go on location?
SPOTNITZ: This is where it is so critical to have the support of Cinemax because we wanted it to be cinematic, and that meant really going to the locations. Really going to Morocco, really going to Scotland; not faking it. And [in] London, we have no sound stages, so everything is shot on location. It’s a lot harder and a lot more expensive, but you see it. It looks fantastic. And you see London in a way that people, especially in America that you rarely get a chance to see. It was really exciting for me to have the opportunity – especially as an American, to go to Europe and have the opportunity to take advantage of all these unbelievable locations that we just don’t get to see that often in this country.
PCZ: Is there something about the story that is easier to tell or can only be told from London as opposed to in America?
SPOTNITZ: Well, I always like to say the perfect plot could only happen to that character. The plot and the character are inseparable. And from the beginning my ambition was to do an international spy drama based in Europe. I can’t imagine this show as its written taking place anywhere else than where it’s set. But having said that, the design of the show is that, however many years it goes on – and hopefully it will go on for a while – we will change cities. Next year we will not be in London. We will be in another European city and there are different stories to tell. It’s very exciting for me as a writer and storyteller to have all this fresh stuff that’s unfamiliar to me as an American. I’m learning as I go. And I had to learn a lot about Britain in the course of writing these eight episodes. And I think it will be interesting for American audiences as well.
HUNTED airs Fridays at 10:00 PM on Cinemax
Episode One: “Mort” – FRIDAY, OCTOBER 19
Synopsis: Sam Hunter (Melissa George), an operative for the elite private intelligence and security firm Byzantium, is finishing a mission in Tangier when an attempt on her life leaves her critically injured. Not knowing who tried to kill her, she disappears to a remote location to recover, regroup and retrain. Returning to work unannounced nearly a year later, Sam surprises her co-workers, who are suspicious about her disappearance, especially Aidan Marsh (Adam Rayner), her secret lover. Her bosses, Rupert Keel (Stephen Dillane) and Deacon Crane (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), retain doubts about her, but need their best agent for an important new assignment. The team devises a plan to have Sam infiltrate a family headed by powerful millionaire Jack Turner (Patrick Malahide), a man with a criminal past whose ambitions are at odds with Byzantium’s secret client.