A Gorgeous Loner With a Long List of Enemies

Carrie is the character played by Claire Danes in Showtime’s “Homeland,” and she has set the bar pretty high for this type of loner-heroine. Carrie is brilliant but troubled, passionate but reticent, as tenacious as she is mysterious. Sam, an operative for a private investigative company named Byzantium, is all of those things as well, but somehow just not as deeply. Sam seems as if she were assembled out of standard-issue parts from the character-generating factory, whereas Carrie seems like an original, a comparison that can also be applied generally to the two series. Melissa George, who plays Sam, of course has her own albatross: Ms. Danes’s Emmy-winning rendition of Carrie. And Ms. George, to be blunt, may simply not be a convincing enough actress to overcome familiar-feeling scripts and her own good looks to achieve credibility in this type of role. Unless she has the capacity to tap into some steely reserve, a flawed heroine ought not to look like she could step out of any given scene for a magazine-cover shoot. But the main thing that makes “Hunted” a slick but not especially riveting show is its construction. In the premiere Sam is nearly killed during an assignment gone wrong, and during the year it takes her to recover from her injuries she has a lot of time to ponder who on the Byzantium team sold her out. Even Aidan (Adam Rayner), her lover at the time of the botched mission, is a suspect. She rejoins the company and becomes the lead investigator on a job involving a very rich and brutal man who is among the bidders seeking to acquire a hydroelectric dam in Pakistan. There is something formulaic about the way the show’s writers make sure that everyone on the Byzantium team seems like a possible traitor; it’s reminiscent of a stage who-done-it. And that’s not the only formula at work here. The gratuitous sex scenes come along like clockwork, Sam’s back story (she witnessed her mother’s murder) is dribbled out in classic fashion and so on. “Hunted” ends up being a competent addition to the high-stakes-snooping genre but not a very surprising one. Hunted Cinemax, Friday nights at 10, Eastern and Pacific times; 9, Central time. Produced by Kudos Film & Television in association with Big Light Productions for Cinemax and BBC One. Created by Frank Spotnitz. Mr. Spotnitz, executive producer; Alison Jackson, Jane Featherstone and Stephen Garrett, executive producers for Kudos Film & Television; Christopher Aird and Polly Hill, executive producers for BBC One; Eliza Mellor, producer. WITH: Melissa George (Sam Hunter), Adam Rayner (Aidan Marsh), Stephen Dillane (Rupert Keel), Stephen Campbell Moore (Stephen Turner), Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (Deacon Crane), Morven Christie (Zoe Morgan), Lex Shrapnel (Ian Fowkes), Indira Varma (Natalie Thorpe), Dhaffer L’Abidine (Bernard Faroux) and Patrick Malahide (Jack Turner).

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