Hunted (Australian TV series)

Did You Know?

• Casting for a second season was announced in August 2022.
• The second season was filmed in Melbourne between 20 February–15 March 2023.
• The third season premiered on 12 August 2024.

Premise

Hunted is a competition series where eighteen contestants, split into nine teams of two, play the role of fugitives trying to outrun a squad of expert hunters. At the start, each pair is set loose from a single meeting point with just an overnight bag and five hundred dollars—two hundred in cash and three hundred on a debit card. Their goal is to rely on their cleverness to stay free for three weeks across the state of Victoria. On the other side, the hunters work to track them down using surveillance tools modeled after real government powers, like automatic number-plate recognition and CCTV.

They can also monitor the fugitives’ bank transactions and phone records. With one day left in the hunt, any fugitives still at large call a designated number to learn the location of the extraction point, a final destination they must reach before time runs out. However, that call also reveals their current position to the hunters. Anyone who dodges capture and arrives at the extraction point on time splits the one-hundred-thousand-dollar grand prize.

For the third season, the rules shifted: subtitled Million Dollar Heist, it kicked off with a robbery. Contestants first pulled off a heist to collect as much money as they could, and that stolen haul became the total prize pool for the season, replacing the fixed one-hundred-thousand-dollar reward.

Contestants

The hunt began with eighteen fugitives launching from Federation Square in Melbourne, and the Inverloch Coastal Reserve was where they were extracted. In a separate season, twenty contestants started at North Wharf in Docklands, within the Port of Melbourne, with the Melbourne Cricket Ground in Yarra Park serving as the extraction point. Another version selected eighteen fugitives, dividing them into two teams of nine: one team acted as bank-robbers, stealing one million dollars from a Ballarat bank, while the other team served as getaway drivers. The bank-robbers were taken to Geelong to meet their partners, and the chase started from there, ending at Gem Pier in Williamstown for extraction.