NBC’s crime drama “The Hunting Party” returned for season 2 with a shocking death.
Oliver Odell (Nick Wechsler) was poisoned during the season 1 finale. The season 2 premiere, which aired Thursday, Jan. 8, revealed that he didn’t survive. Oliver’s death, which took place offscreen, was confirmed when FBI secret agent Bex Henderson (Melissa Roxburgh) was seen mourning her ex’s passing.
Wechsler was listed as a cast member in an NBC press release about season 2, so his character’s death was unexpected. “The Hunting Party” executive producer JJ Bailey told TVLine that the show’s creative team “wrestled” with whether or not Oliver should die.
Nick Wechsler as Oliver Odell in “The Hunting Party.”David Astorga/NBC
“One thing that we sort of faced was creatively, it was hard to involve [Oliver] in the field and to find stories that felt like it really serviced what we wanted to do with the character and with Bex,” Bailey explained. His fellow executive producer Jake Coburn also weighed in on the decision.
“I would say that I think the character [of Oliver], he was so intricately tied to [Bex’s] past, and at a certain point, we processed a lot of that story and emotion. And it felt like going forward, we were more looking in terms of the characters that were going to be part of her future story, and felt like we’d squeezed all the juice from the relationship that we could,” Coburn said.
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“The Hunting Party” follows Bex, a former FBI profiler who resumes the job after a secret underground prison called The Pit explodes, releasing the nation’s most dangerous serial killers back into society. Roxburgh, who plays Bex, didn’t know Wechsler would be written off the show when they filmed the dramatic season 1 finale.
“[It was] left on a cliffhanger, so I’m like, ‘OK, maybe there’s hope that he’s not dead.’ Because the Bex-Odell storyline, I feel like it needed something; it needed closure,” Roxburgh told TVLine. “So, I was really hoping [he’d live]. But you know what? It’s a great plot twist, I think, that coming into season 2 and finding out that the cliffhanger … audiences will be more inclined to tune in because I think that they weren’t expecting that.”
During season 2, Bex reassembles her team to continue hunting the escaped serial killers. The mysterious Eve Lazarus (Kari Matchett), who was a former Pit inmate, is now the team leader. Roxburgh told Collider that Bex and her teammates are “always going to be suspicious” of Lazarus, whose backstory remains a mystery.
“The Hunting Party” airs on NBC Thursdays at 10 p.m. ET. Episodes are available to stream on Peacock the day after they air.