@joelkeller Published March 4, 2026, 12:30 p.m. ET More On: thrillers New On Hulu March 2026, Plus What’s Coming Next Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Trap House’ on Netflix, an Eyeroller of a Crime-Thriller Starring Dave Bautista New On Tubi March 2026 New On Peacock March 2026 The Hunt was pulled from Apple TV’s premiere schedule shortly before its original premiere date in December because it was brought to Apple and the production company’s attention that the French thriller’s plot very closely resembled that of Douglas Fairbairn’s novel Shoot. It took three months for the production company to compensate Fairbairn’s estate and the makers of the movie version of Shoot, then insert into the opening credits one of the longest “Based On” credits we’ve ever seen. But those efforts allowed Apple to release the series. Was it worth the wait?
Opening Shot: In a cabin in the woods, four friends get ready to go hunting. They banter that they’re going out too late, and one of them says it’s as much about hanging out as it is about bagging game.
The Gist: The friends — Franck (Benoît Magimel), Simon (Cédric Appietto), Gilles (Manuel Guillot) and Xavier (Damien Bonnard) — come to a river as they walk through the woods, a river they’ve passed dozens of time. They see other hunters on the other bank, then all of a sudden bullets start flying in their direction. Xavier gets grazed by a bullet on the side of his head, and in the firefight, Franck (or is it Simon?) shoots one of the other set of hunters.
The man goes down like he’s been killed, but as the friends scramble back to the cabin then pack up to leave, they have no idea if the person is dead or not. Since everyone but Gillies are married with kids, they decide to go back to Gillies’ house, and call Léo (Frédéric Maranber), a doctor friend of theirs, to patch Xavier up.
Franck is the one who is most paranoid that someone is after them. But he is also the most unaffected when he comes home to his wife Krystel (Mélanie Laurent), a doctor whose clinic treats troubled teens from a group home, and kids.
The next day, Franck takes it upon himself to go back to the scene and look for their shell casings, which aren’t there. He then finds an obituary for a man who died in a hunting accident and takes it upon himself to visit the man’s widow, posing as a high school friend.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Hunt (Original title: Traqués) has the ominous feel of the series Most Dangerous Game.
Our Take: There is a whole lot about the first episode of The Hunt, created by Cédric Anger (and others… read the opening paragraph of this review for that story) that made us look like a chin-rubbing emoji, because some of it didn’t make a whole lot of sense.
The incident that sets off the events of this series, where Franck and his friends get shot at in the middle of the woods, has no context. We don’t know anything about this group, and we have no idea why these people are shooting at them. We even had to repeatedly watch the scene where one of the shooters is killed to see whether Franck or Simon shot the fatal shot, and even after that, we weren’t certain who did it.
Perhaps that confusion is part of what Anger wanted us to feel, because Franck and company sure don’t have any idea what’s going on. And as the pressure ramps up and the group comes to realize what Franck already seems to know, that they’re being hunted in their everyday lives, that confusion is going to be more acute, and it’s going to come out in different ways.
The problem is, the only character that seems to get any kind of depth is Franck, who has sexy times with Krystel, a younger son with some behavioral problems, and a hardware business that seems to employ (and then fire) emotionally unstable people. It’s pretty easy to see that Franck has a past; He has a lot of guns and an endless supply of burner phones and SIM cards. We can’t imagine that his past isn’t part of why they got shot at, but that may be revealed more as the pressure mounts.
The other three guys feel more like booze-swilling caricatures, but that might just be a function of a first episode that can’t go in depth on every character. The roots of the group’s friendship and some more depth on Simon, Xavier and Gillies would certainly go a long way towards making The Hunt a thriller that’s an effective character study, as well.
Performance Worth Watching: Benoît Magimel displays Franck’s paranoia well, but also show that he’s the one who will do the most to find out more about the man they shot and why these hunters were after them to begin with.
Sex And Skin: None in the first episode.
Parting Shot: Franck comes home and sees his mailbox is open; he opens it and sees the four shell casings he was looking for, all neatly stood up in a line.
Sleeper Star: What Mélanie Laurent’s character Krystel is doing in her work is going to tie into the shooting somehow, but we just can’t figure out what that is at the moment.
Most Pilot-y Line: The dead hunter’s widow starts going off to Franck about the “tree-hugging assholes” that so filled her older son’s head with ideas that she’s sure he doesn’t care that his dad is dead.
Our Call: STREAM IT. We’re not completely sure that The Hunt will get any deeper than what we saw in the first episode. But there are signs that, at the very least, it will be a tense thriller, even if it’s not a very character-driven one.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
