‘The Hunting Party’ Kills off Major Character in Season 2 Premiere

The Hunting Party kicked off its second season with a major character death.

NBC’s sophomore drama came back on Thursday with a troubling update on Nick Wechsler’s Oliver Odell.

The Season 1 finale ended on a cliffhanger that saw Oliver being poisoned by a serial killer, and the last that fans saw of him was him fighting to survive in Bex’s (Melissa Roxburgh) arms. Fans find out pretty quickly in the Season 2 premiere by way of his gravestone that he did not survive. Roxburgh told TV Insider that at the time of the finale, they had no idea Oliver’s fate was going to go the way it did.

“So they wrote that, and that we actually didn’t get to read that until the last minute, which sucked,” she said. “But then it’s left on a cliffhanger, so I’m like, OK, maybe there’s hope that he’s not dead. Because I think the Bex-Odell storyline, I feel like it needed something; it needed closure. So I was really hoping. But you know what? It’s a great plot twist, I think, that coming into Season 2 and finding out that the cliffhanger, it went off the edge, audiences will be more inclined to tune in because I think that they weren’t expecting that.”

As for why they killed off Oliver, executive producers JJ Bailey and Jake Coburn revealed the reason, but Bailey said it was a “loaded question.” He shared, “We wrestled with it for so long. I think ultimately there’s several schools of thought, but one thing that we sort of faced was creatively, it was hard to involve him in the field and to find stories that felt like it really serviced what we wanted to do with the character and with Bex.”

“And honestly, I think there was a part of us that felt like we had such great chemistry out in the field with the three of them, that it felt, on one hand, creatively very limiting for the Oliver story,” Bailey continued. “And then when we realized we were going to shut down the team in Season 1 and have to restart things and have Bex fight for it, it felt like his death was going to be the right thing to motivate Bex to come back both feet in and really drive her forward.”

“I would say that I think the character, he was so intricately tied to her past, and at a certain point, we processed a lot of that story and emotion,” added Coburn. “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 more and felt like we’d squeezed all the juice from the relationship that we could.”

While it may not have been the outcome fans hoped for, this will surely impact the series moving forward, as Roxburgh admitted we could “see [Bex] crack.” She continued, “It depends what she turns that into, though. I think there’s a version of her that lets it unravel her, and then there’s a version of her that makes it strengthen her towards catching these guys and bringing them to justice.”

Tune in on Thursdays at 10 p.m. ET on NBC for new episodes of The Hunting Party, streaming the next day on Peacock, to see what happens.