Hunter's Fred Dryer ready for action.Image via NBC
By
Roger Froilan
Published 9 minutes ago
Roger is passionate about movies and TV shows, as well as the drive-in theater. Aside from hosting and producing three podcasts and a monthly live show, he also collects comic books, records, VHS tapes, and classic TV Guides. Currently, he's gotten into restoring cars and enjoys many of the shows on the Motortrend channel.
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There’s a specific kind of show that used to live on Saturday nights — not prestige, not fluff, just the sort of dependable bruiser you’d catch while folding laundry or working through some leftover pizza. Hunter was that show. If you watched even a handful of episodes, you remember the vibe more than anything: Fred Dryer cutting through a crime scene like a man who didn’t have time for nonsense, the Los Angeles sun bleaching everything down to the bone, and that sturdy rhythm of two cops trying to push back a tide that didn’t care who it swallowed next.
It had that same “grab your jacket and jump in” energy you’d feel watching Wiseguy on a rerun loop or catching an old Streets of San Francisco episode when the cable schedule got weird late at night. The funny part, at least to this author, is how many people forgot it existed. Not in the “oh yeah, that was cute” sense — they genuinely forgot. Seven seasons, a respectable stack of TV movies, decent ratings, and half the world acts like you’re pitching them a fake show from a late-night Saturday Night Live sketch. But Hunter was real, and it was good in that scrappy, blue-collar, don’t-overthink-it way network TV used to be proud of. It lived in that same neighborhood as shows like Hardcastle and McCormick or early-era Cagney & Lacey — nothing fancy, just meat-and-potatoes storytelling with a badge and a bad attitude. And now, somehow, the whole thing is sitting online for free on Tubi like a time capsule nobody bothered to rebury.
'Hunter' Is a Crime Series That Doesn't Hold Back
Hunter's Stephanie Kramer and Fredy Dryer.Image via NBC
If Miami Vice was the stylish kid who understood color palettes before Instagram existed, and Magnum P.I. was the island-smart charmer who knew how to talk his way out of a bar fight, Hunter was the guy who walked straight through the brawl and dealt with the consequences later. Much like Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, Dryer’s Detective Rick Hunter wasn’t polished. He had that look of a man who’d spent more nights than he’d admit sleeping wherever he landed, dragging the fog of it into the next shift. And there’s something oddly comforting about a lead who isn’t trying to come across a certain way.
But what people forget — or maybe never knew — is that this wasn’t a one-man show. Stepfanie Kramer’s Dee Dee McCall gave the whole thing a center of gravity. Their partnership settled into this easy, sturdy back-and-forth that made the big action swing harder. It wasn’t the kind of chemistry you plaster on Valentine’s cards; it was two exhausted cops learning to read each other’s breath patterns because half the job required preempting disaster before it got a running start.
The irony is that Hunter arrived during a TV crossroads. Most crime shows were either slathered in glossy colors and pop-video attitude, or they’d locked themselves into neat weekly puzzles built for casual channel-hopping. Hunter cut straight through that divide. It stayed rough around the edges, louder and more chaotic; the kind of show that didn’t mind letting the mess sit there for a beat before anyone grabbed a broom.
'Hunter's Middle Ground Accidentally Became the Crime Hit's Sweet Spot
Fred Dryer and Stepfanie Kramer in HunterImage via NBC
What makes Hunter so interesting in hindsight is how confidently it lived between tones. One week, you’d get a villain straight out of a grindhouse fever dream; the next, an episode that felt like it had been carved out of the newspapers stacked behind the precinct coffee pot. That wobble shouldn’t work — normally it turns a show into confetti — but the weird thing is, Hunter thrived because of it.
There’s a moment in almost every episode where you catch the show flexing something surprisingly grounded. Maybe it’s McCall quietly pulling Hunter back from crossing a line, or Hunter noticing a small detail in a witness’s expression that suggests he’s not as trigger-happy as people assume. The explosions and chases might’ve grabbed your attention, but the stuff that stuck — the little exchanges, the way they recalibrated after a rough call — that’s what gave the thing its spine. Nobody was trying to be delicate, yet the show carried more texture than it ever got credit for.
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Posts 7 By Brad LaCour Jun 15, 2025And then there’s the era shift. By the time Hunter pushed into its later years, you could feel TV starting to tilt — darker stories, longer arcs, characters getting a little more room to breathe. Hunter didn’t overhaul itself; it just eased forward with the tide. Same blunt force, same bones, but with a shade more self-awareness and a little extra weight in the quieter beats. It never tried to reinvent its face, which might be exactly why it stayed steady as long as it did.
'Hunter' Is an Excellent Crime Drama That Has Weirdly Been Lost to Time
Hunter's Fred Dryer looking for suspects.Image via NBC
The bizarre thing about Hunter’s place in pop culture is how quietly it slipped off the map. You’d expect a seven-season show — especially one that aired on a major network — to have carved out at least a small permanent footprint. But television is strange. Wrong time slot? Poof. Off the syndication carousel for a few years? Gone. A couple of TV movies that didn’t quite recapture the old spark? People start assuming the original was disposable.
And Hunter had the misfortune of aging into an era where reruns were reshuffled based on market whims instead of nostalgic affection. If you weren’t already looking for it, you'd never stumble across it again. It kept getting nudged into quieter corners, eventually landing in that strange limbo where half the internet shouts “underrated classic” and the other half goes, “Hunter? Like… the Activision video game?”
But here’s the thing: shows like Hunter don’t really die. They just wait. As soon as streaming opened its doors to older catalog titles that didn’t fit neatly into nostalgia algorithms, shows like this started surfacing again. You scroll past one episode, then two, then suddenly the autoplay hits you with five hours of Los Angeles shootouts and Fred Dryer glowering his way through municipal paperwork. It’s weirdly comforting. Like finding an old denim jacket in the back of your closet and being thrilled that it still fits.
'Hunter' Deserves a Second Chance for Many Reasons
Maybe the reason Hunter lands differently now is that today’s crime dramas don’t leave much room for the middle ground anymore. Everything’s either sleek prestige or procedural minimalism. The pulpy, rough-edged, “let’s throw a car through that warehouse and see what happens” type of show is practically extinct. And for all its muscle, Hunter always had a heart. You don’t stick around for seven seasons because you can stage a convincing explosion. You stick because the dynamic works — the partnership lands, the cases keep their shape, the world feels lived-in even when the villains chew scenery like it’s an Olympic sport.
And that’s what makes the show ripe for rediscovery. New viewers don’t need nostalgia to enjoy it; they just need to appreciate TV that isn’t embarrassed to be muscular and straightforward. Older viewers will pick up on the rhythm right away, the way you remember the sound of your childhood home’s screen door even after you’ve been gone for twenty years. Plus — and let’s be honest — free is a magic word. “Seven seasons of surprisingly sturdy, sometimes wild, always entertaining crime TV at no cost” is the sort of pitch streaming services should slap on a billboard.
Hunter was never meant to be a masterpiece. It was meant to be reliable, rowdy, and occasionally better than it needed to be. A workhorse. A survivor from a weird transition era when TV didn’t know whether it wanted neon or noir, and somehow delivered both. And now that it’s back within reach, the timing feels oddly perfect. If you’ve never watched it, you’re getting a full seven seasons of unapologetic, big-swing television that refuses to whisper when it could just kick the damn door down. If you have watched it… it’s probably time to revisit the bruiser.
Hunter
Like TV-14 Drama Action Crime Release Date 1984 - 1991-00-00 Network NBC Directors James Whitmore Jr., Michael Preece, Tony Mordente, James Darren, Winrich Kolbe, Corey Allen, Ron Satlof, Bruce Kessler, Alexander Singer, Richard A. Colla, Peter Crane, Michael O'Herlihy, Michael Lange, Kim Manners, James Fargo, Douglas Heyes, Arnold Laven, Bob Bralver, Gus Trikonis, Guy Magar, Randy Roberts, James L. Conway, Sidney Hayers, Bill Duke Writers Herbert Wright, Dallas L. Barnes, Catherine Clinch, Howard Chesley, Joe Gannon, Kathy McCormick, Randall Wallace, Richard C. Okie, Stepfanie Kramer, David Kemper, E. Nick Alexander, Allan Cole, Marianne ClarksonCast
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Al Pugliese
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Andrew W. Walker
Murderer (voice)
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Angus Duncan
Dr. Pierpoint
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