Just before stay-at-home orders and social distancing kicked off in full force, Amazon Prime released its original show “Hunters,” which gives us complicated moral conundrums, great action, sad historical reminders and, of course, hunting down Nazis. With its 10 episodes, each an hour long, it is an easy show to binge watch while staying home. 

Be warned, there are spoilers ahead. 

Debuting Feb. 11, the show made a big splash, immediately throwing the audience into Nazi-killing territory. In the summer of 1977, the show starts at what seems to be a normal afternoon barbecue — that is, until a Holocaust survivor appears and recognizes the host to be a Nazi officer notoriously known as “The Butcher of Arlav.” The officer then immediately kills everyone at the picnic, then shoots himself in the arm to make it look like he was also a victim and frames a black man for the attack (go figure, the Nazi was racist). 

With all of that being in the first four minutes, this may be one of the higher points of this episode. It continues with meeting the main character of the show, Jonah Heidelbaum, played by Logan Lerman, and his grandmother, who gets killed by another Nazi who has been looking for her. 

From here the show kicks off, as Jonah is taken in by a friend of his grandmother’s: Meyer Offerman, played by Al Pacino. He then looks for the Nazi who killed his grandmother for revenge, as we begin to learn about the growing group of Nazis who we learn is calling itself “The Fourth Reich.” 

When Jonah finds the Nazi, who we learn forced Jewish prisoners to play games of human chess that ended in many of their deaths, Meyer saves him, as Jonah was about to get killed. This is the start of the hint that Meyer is more than just an old man. 

At the end of the episode, after Meyer takes Jonah away from the now-dead Nazi, we find that Meyer has been hunting down Nazis with a group of Nazi-killing specialists made up of a Jewish actor, a black rights activist, a nun who is a former MI-6 agent, a Vietnam War veteran and a weapons specialist couple that survived the Holocaust. A lot of the characters in this group are based on actual Nazi hunters.

One of the points of comedy that happens periodically in “Hunters” is when it steps back from the show in a comic-book-style aside to introduce the characters or explain how to figure out if you know a Nazi. These comedic insertions are enough to lighten the mood of the show and act as a good transition between scenes. While this could be considered to be a bit cheesy, I think it fits well with the energy of the show and only adds to it. 

This show has its high moments of entertainment and espionage along with its somber moments of rememberance for all the lives lost in the Holocaust, but it also has its flaws. As mentioned earlier, the show used a graphic scene of human chess being played in a Jewish internment camp in Nazi Germany. I find this to be a wholly unnecessary creation of a fictionalized horror that was supposed to take place during the Holocaust. The Holocaust had enough horrifying attrocities already that there isn’t a need to create a new atrocity to push the point that the Holocaust was bad. Citing the Holocaust itself is enough to do that. 

Other reviews have claimed that the show is a bit insensitive due to our current social climate. The idea of a new wave of Nazis trying to overthrow American society in secret, when there has been a rise in racially motivated crimes in recent times, may be a bit tasteless, but the show is so much more than just that.

Outside of the action and solemnity, “Hunters” also highlights Jewish culture in a big way. With such a focus on killing in the show, it also finds ways to celebrate Jewish life in the story that, admittedly, even brought tears to my eyes. We get to see many parts of Jewish faith and life through a wedding, funeral, and just a gathering and celebration of the culture.

This show is binge-worthy because of the Nazi killing, comic book-ish cutaways and an in-depth dive into Jewish culture. I managed to binge it in about four days myself, and I highly suggest others to try to beat my time and enjoy doing it.