Here’s a hint: This is not an ideal product-placement situation for soda marketed in plastic bottles.
To their credit, the producers do everything they can to make the show sizzle, including pounding music and swooping aerial shots that rapidly dart from Los Angeles to Manhattan, like an over-caffeinated Google Earth. Manhunters: Fugitive Task Force is a half-hour reality television show which premiered on A&E in December 2008. It’s just that in the episodes previewed the fugitives seem more pathetic than dangerous, and their encounters with the law don’t exactly meet our bloodthirsty, TV-honed expectations.
It chronicles US Marshals and local law enforcement as they hunt down some of America's worst fugitives. (A disclaimer reminds us that suspects are innocent until proven guilty, but that’s only after the cops talk incessantly about what scumbags they are.) The show's primary focus is on the New York/New Jersey Regional Fugitive Task Force based out of New York City.
In short, “Manhunters” doesn’t even marginally advance the ball beyond the cinema-verite standard “Cops” established and has maintained for a couple of decades, other than to provide another reminder that police work is seldom as glamorous as TV and movies make it out to be. After an extended wait to see if a tip is going to pan out, one cop mutters, “There’s a lot of boredom, obviously.
