Sliding in under the radar and quickly grabbing our attention, Channel 10’s reality show Hunted suddenly had everyone talking when the first season premiered in 2022.
Bringing in a strong viewer base across its first two episodes, the cat-and-mouse competition was the ratings juggernaut we didn’t expect.
The basic premise is that 18 ‘fugitives’ are sent out on the run, with the not-so-simple task of avoiding a crack team of detectives and intelligence experts who are there to track them down and knock them out of the running to win $100,000.
If they can evade detection for 21 days, the fugitives – who work in pairs – will win a share of the prize money.
But just two episodes into the first season, the audience already began questioning how this show could possibly be real.
We were shown crystal-clear footage of a fugitive removing money from a random country ATM and watched as the detectives allegedly hacked into the ‘telematics’ of a car driven by another runaway.
“I find it hard to believe Channel 10 can get live CCTV out of a country ATM and telematics our of a random Nissan, but can’t put on-demand and rewind functionality into Paramount+,” one sceptical viewer tweeted at the time.
And an interview with Deputy Intelligence Ben Owen reveals they might not be so far off base.
“I’m not sure I can give you the exact mechanics of how it works from the ground back into production. But what I can say is it’s simulating, replicating real life,” Ben previously told TV Tonight of the show.
While they can’t really access CCTV, most of the camera footage used is captured by covert operators who travel with the fugitives but mostly keep out of the way.
“The camera operators with the fugitives are incredible at their job and they’re named covert camera operators for a reason,” Ben revealed.
“So, they’re not going to be running down the road with a whacking great big camera. They will be blending into the background and making sure they’re out of the way.”
As for whether the camera operators visually tip off the detectives, given they can be spotted alongside fugitives, it seems they’re able to avoid this too.
“As we were filming this one, we had some camera operators say ‘I had to hide.’ So even if they see us, they’ll be hiding out of the way, making sure we don’t see them,” Ben revealed.
“And one thing we absolutely can’t do, for professionalism and for fairness, is that we would never use any production assets to the benefit of the hunt.”
During the 2024 season, Chief Hunter Reece Dewar shut down the rumours of the show being fake, telling Yahoo! Lifestyle it was “as real as we can make it given the parameters we have.”
“I wouldn’t be part of the show if it wasn’t realistic, and I dare say other investigators and Hunters wouldn’t be as well,” he continued. “We treat it as real as we possibly can. We’ve got law enforcement professionals, intelligence professionals, Special Operations personnel from the Australian Defence Force. They’re all part of this show, and that makes it so much more real for us that we are actually hunting live Fugitives.”
But does this prove the show is fake? As with most of our favourite reality shows, we’re taking it with a pinch of salt and leaning into the drama of watching the fugitives run for their lives.
