Ten’s new cat-and-mouse reality show Hunted took a surreal twist on Sunday night’s episode as two contestants did everything they could to avoid capture by the ‘hunters’.
Victorian contestants Stathi and Matt were shown in some rather skimpy costumes so they could ‘fly under the radar’ before boarding a regional bus.
Their costumes certainly did the opposite though, with Matt donning a blonde wig and ill-fitting sunglasses and the red-bearded Stathi donning a shop-bought floral dress and covering her head with a black network to become “nonna”:
hunted sees the contestants released in pairs into central Melbourne with a simple instruction: avoid capture by the team of intelligence officers tasked with tracking their movements. Those who last 21 days without being caught will share the $100,000 prize.
After a week, and most of the contestants who have already been caught have been detected because they stayed too long with personal contacts – friends and family – who offered them help.
With that in mind, Stathi and Matt did their best to go incognito during their brief meeting with their friend Katherine, who had arranged for them a Kombi van for transport.
Their meeting was perhaps the weirdest scene of the season so far, as Katherine lingered in front of a pay phone while Stathi, dressed in a drag nonna outfit, walked in wide circles around the phone, downwards, and instructed him not to look at it, but telling him to meet them under a nearby bridge.
In his efforts to avoid detection, he put on a traffic-stopping spectacle, a spectacle that fellow Ten star Kate Langbroek dubbed “glorious madness” on social media. Others agreed:
hunted has been a success for Ten in its first week on air, debuting last Sunday with 619,000 viewers across the five metro capitals, before reaching 711,000 viewers for episode two.
But it has not been without some confusion on the part of viewers, who have been puzzled as to how hunted The team of investigators has access to, for example, live CCTV footage from an ATM in a remote country.
It turns out that camera operators discreetly following each of the escapees help replicate some CCTV footage and send it back to base.
“Based on this footage, we can access it, but only if we are in the right place, at the right time, with the right time parameters and confirm that there are cameras. Only then will we get this information. So, again, it’s completely fair how they simulate it.” hunted said intelligence officer Ben Owen TV tonight in a recent interview.