Spoilers below for anyone who hasn’t yet streamed at least the first episode of The Bondsman with an Amazon Prime subscription.
As his TV follow-up to Showtime’s heady crime drama City on a Hill, Kevin Bacon returned to his more spooky roots for the new gore-speckled horror-comedy The Bondsman. An absolute hoot from start to finish and unlike anything else on the 2025 TV schedule to date, this is definitely one of the week’s most watchable streaming debuts. But it does kick off on an extremely wild and unexpected note, with Bacon’s character Hub Halloran getting his throat sliced open. The gruesome turn of events is no dream sequence, either.
Not many shows would murder their main characters before audiences know who they’re watching, but The Bondsman isn’t like most shows. Granted, the fate is in the basic synopsis of Hub being a bounty hunter who returns from the dead to track evil demons down and banish them to Hell. But it’s still a bonkers opening. So when CinemaBlend spoke with showrunner Erik Oleson, I had to ask about starting everything off by killing off Kevin Bacon in such a gnarly way. Here’s what he told me:
Well, I wanted to establish the world for the audience in the opening sequence, and so I wrote a sequence of events that basically encapsulates, not just who Hub Halloran is - the character that Kevin is playing - but teaches you several different aspects of what the show will be. You're going to laugh, you're going to be shocked. There's going to be blood, there's also going to be heart.
As anyone who continues to stream the series knows, the showrunner is talking about the innate sense of family love and emotion, and not like literally pieces of someone's heart. Although nobody should be counting that possibility out, either.
Erik Oleson previously served as a showrunner for Daredevil' s third and final Netflix season, among other projects, so he's quite versed in crafting hyper-violent scenes where morals are totally up in the air. But with that show and his next effort, Prime Video's Carnival Row, he led the creative team for follow-up seasons. With The Bondsman, he was able to craft his own beginning, and as he told me, he wanted viewers gobsmacked right from the jump.
What I wanted the audience to do when they got to the end of that opening sequence of the pilot was kind of look at each other and go like, 'What the fuck is this show?' And so that's why I wanted to lay it out that way.
I was fully aware of what The Bondsman was about when I sat down to watch the premiere, and I was still taken aback by how quickly the town's more dangerous side is explored. Had the rest of the episode remained as dark and gritty and unrelenting as that one, I probably wouldn't have questioned it, either. Thankfully, though, the world gets a lot brighter, sillier and more heartwarming once other characters are introduced, such as Beth Grant's Kitty, Jennifer Nettles' Maryanne and Damon Herriman's Lucky.
But would it be quite as good without Kevin Bacon's optimistically world-weary energy behind Hub's performance? I can't confirm or deny, but Erik Oleson had nothing but kind things to say about the actor during our talk, and by extension, noted that it was run to see Bacon's Hub facing larger-than-life situations, either alone or with his family. In his words:
It's fun to kind of put this character in an extraordinary situation and then have him go like, 'Huh, okay, demon. All right, well I guess we gotta get on with it, then.' It's just so funny to watch somebody take that in stride and then go DIY demon gear to go hunt them down. I mean, bringing his mama into it, like, what? What kind of show does that? It's fun.
It's also the only show where you can watch Kevin Bacon wrap up his icky neck wound with duct tape, and then search the same site to get duct tape delivered to your own house. Hopefully for far different reasons.
All eight episodes of The Bondsman are currently available to stream on Prime Video. For my horror-comedy tastes, it's one of the best Amazon shows streaming, and I can only hope that enough people check it out to make Season 2 a reality.
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