Stream It Or Skip It?

In 2022, Washington Post reporter Kevin Sieff wrote a story about his time with a Mexican police squad nicknamed “The Gringo Hunters.” Their job is to chase down American fugitives in Mexico and hand them back to U.S. Marshals. Imagine Entertainment made that story into a Mexican-based procedural on Netflix.

Opening Shot: At a marina in Tijuana, Temo (Dagoberto Gama) warns his unit that the fugitive they’re after is an athlete and very dangerous.

The Gist: The fugitive, who is American, is being chased because he has been accused of multiple murderers and the U.S. government is eager to get him back. As the squad, called the International Liaison Unit of the federal police, chases this fugitive through the arena, he proves to be elusive. But the unit — Nico (Harold Torres), Gloria (Mayra Hermosillo), Archi (Andrew Leland Rogers), Beto (Manuel Masalva) and Cri (Héctor Kotsifakis) eventually get their man and deport him into the custody of the U.S. Marshals.

The public chase is described by a vlogger in a video that goes viral, with the team being nicknamed “The Gringo Hunters.” Temo is none too happy about this, as his boss, Ortega (Gerardo Trejoluna) has demanded the squad keep a low profile.

Gloria and Nico try to find an American woman who is accused of killing her boyfriend by training a dog to bite the man’s genitals off. In the process of investigating, Gloria finds that the woman’s younger daughter was exploited in a revenge porn scheme by the murdered boyfriend. She uses a fake account to befriend the woman’s older daughter, and when the cops get close to the fugitive, she promises the woman’s daughter that she’ll do right by her. The job becomes especially dangerous when a group of men kidnap her and hold her hostage before Gloria and Nico can nab her.

Temo picks up a fugitive accused of fraud, but the fugitive tells him that he knows things that many dangerous people would want to kill him for. Much of the information is in a notebook, which Temo retrieves and hides. He tries to pull in favors with Ortega, an old friend as well as his boss, to figure out how to get the fugitive into witness protection.

In the meantime, a referendum is being voted on to create a casino district in New Tijuana, with a developer named Juaquin Meyer-Rodriguez (José María Yazpik) at its center. He’s teaming up with Father Murphy (Sebastian Roché), a well-known youth pastor, to make sure the project has community elements to it, but even the members of the Gringo Hunters aren’t sold.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Gringo Hunters, based on a 2022 Washington Post story about a real life Gringo Hunters unit, very much has a network procedural feel, along the lines of the NCIS and FBI franchises.

Our Take: The procedural nature of The Gringo Hunters reveals itself in how uneven its plots are. Yes, we get to know the actual members of the unit a bit here and there — we even get to see Gloria’s and Nico’s kids and home lives in brief scenes — but the stories that revolve around their cases are going to be the centerpiece of the series. And there’s a bit of inconsistency there.

The story of Nico and Gloria going after the American woman who killed her boyfriend because of revenge porn fell flat because there wasn’t a whole lot in the way of consequences or resolution there. Gloria promises the woman’s daughter that she’ll make sure the marshals know why her mom did what she did, and we get a reunion at the end of the story, but it somehow feels incomplete. And we’re not even really sure what Gloria actually did to protect the woman.

The more conspiracy-themed story that involved Temo is more intriguing, as we know that will have some far-reaching consequences during the season. We don’t exactly know why he’s protecting this fugitive, and we’ll see by the end of the episode that it will lead to dire results. We do wish we got a bit more explanation before we watched Temo risk his decorated career — and his life — to protect this guy, though.

The various members of the squad, who will be joined by a new recruit (Regina Nava) in Episode 2, have yet to differentiate themselves, aside from Gloria. But, in the tradition of the procedural, we’ll find out more about Nico, Beto, Archi and Cri as they go out and catch more fugitives.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.

Parting Shot: Nico goes to meet Temo late at night and is devastated by what he finds.

Sleeper Star: Guillermo Nava plays “El Crazy”, a gang member Father Murphy deals with. The only reason why we cite him is that the character has a tattoo with the word “LOCO” on his mouth. We know it’s all makeup, but imagine if someone did that for real?

Most Pilot-y Line: Cri, who has dual Mexican-U.S. citizenship, says he voted for Trump twice. We guess that’s a piece of character information for Cri, but it’s not exactly a piece we wanted to know about.

Our Call: STREAM IT. While the show is a bit uneven, The Gringo Hunters boasts an intriguing cast and interesting stories about this elite squad catching American fugitives in Mexico.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.