General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Hunting Season

Hunting Season is an American comedy-drama web series with LGBT themes, created by Jon Marcus, that tracks Alex, a gay Manhattan writer who is single, and his circle of friends as they navigate romance and careers in New York City; after finding himself unattached, Alex launches a confidential sex blog that he uses to sort out what he truly desires.¹ The story was inspired by and largely based on the 2005–08 blog The Great Cock Hunt and the 2008 novel of the same name published by Kensington Books.² The same title has also been used for a 2025 American action thriller starring Mel Gibson, an Argentine drama released internationally as Hunting Season, a Turkish crime film, a Dutch game show format, and other works, which are listed at the end of this article.

Key fact	Detail
Format	Two seasons: Season 1 of 8 ten-minute episodes on LogoTV.com; Season 2 of 4 half-hour episodes on Vimeo on Demand¹
Run	2012–2015; 12 episodes; status ended³
Creator	Jon Marcus, who also wrote and directed; writer Adam Baran contributed to 8 episodes³^•⁴
Season 2 funding	A $150,000 Kickstarter campaign; episodes expanded from about 10 to about 20 minutes⁵
Principal cast	Ben Baur (Alex), Marc Sinoway (Tommy), Jake Manabat (TJ), Jack Ferver (Nick), Tyler French (Reese), Walker Hare (Lenny)³
Reception	IMDb rating 7.3/10 from about 1,200 votes⁶
Awards	Best Comedy Ensemble at the 7th Annual Indie Series Awards; Outstanding Composer, Producer, and Sound Design at LA Webfest 2012¹

Spoilers

Content and intent

The series follows Alex (Ben Baur), a writer for Gawker who chronicles his sexual encounters on an anonymous blog, with his friends Tommy (Marc Sinoway), a skilled cruiser; Nick (Jack Ferver), the older member of the group who wants a relationship; and TJ (Jake Manabat), in a long-term relationship that appears headed for trouble.⁵^•¹² In season 2, Alex runs into someone from his past and reconsiders the consequences of his freedom, Tommy confronts someone who despises him, and TJ and his husband explore non-monogamy in their marriage.¹³

Marcus's stated aim was to show gay characters with full sex lives, in the same way straight characters have them, at a time when he felt broadcasters had lost interest in gay-led shows after Queer as Folk and The L Word. The uncensored cut includes frontal nudity; Marcus said the point was not pornography but refusing to cut away when characters have sex, and he described the show as comparable to Sex and the City for gay men.⁵^•¹⁴ Reviewers made the same comparison, calling it a gay Sex and the City about a blogger dealing with sex, New York, and his three best friends.¹²

Origin and production

Jon Marcus, a producer on films including Boys Don't Cry and Hedwig and the Angry Inch and the ABC series Scoundrels, conceived the series after a dispute with ABC's standards and practices department while working on Scoundrels. He acquired the rights to The Great Cock Hunt, an anonymous blog about one gay man's sexual life in New York City, about five years before the show's debut, and pitched an adaptation to the gay networks Logo, Here, and Q; all three declined.⁵^•⁷

Self-financing and the Logo deal. Marcus left his job as a TV producer, sold most of his belongings, moved from Los Angeles to New York, and self-financed a season of eight episodes. Just weeks before the planned online launch in 2012, Logo contacted him and offered a contract to broadcast the series on LogoTV.com.⁷^•⁸ The show premiered on September 12, 2012, in two versions: an edited, safe-for-work cut on Logo's website and an uncensored cut for paid download on HuntingSeason.TV, with new episodes on both platforms each Wednesday.⁶^•⁷

Season 2. Logo was unable to back a second season, so the production turned to Kickstarter with a $150,000 campaign that closed on December 6, 2013.⁹^•¹⁰ The funded season brought functional changes: episodes grew from about 10 minutes to a sitcom-length average of around 20 minutes, and the business model changed from a free censored version plus a paid uncensored version to an uncensored-only version that viewers could buy for $4.99 or rent for $2.99 per episode on Vimeo on Demand.⁵ The four half-hour episodes premiered beginning May 5, 2015, with the final episode airing May 26, 2015.¹¹^•³

Reception and recognition

The first season drew press attention for its frank treatment of gay sex; BuzzFeed listed it among six stand-out gay web series of 2012, and The Guardian described it in 2013 as a sexually frank show about a 20-something gay man exploring the sexscape of New York, part of a wave of gay-themed web dramas flourishing while mainstream networks stayed cautious.¹⁵^•¹⁶ The show's own press page records coverage in The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, Fast Company, The Guardian, and The Wall Street Journal, among others.¹⁷

Awards. The series won Best Comedy Ensemble at the 7th Annual Indie Series Awards, with nominations for Best Comedy Series, Best Actor (Ben Baur), Best Writing, Best Soundtrack, and Best Sound Design; it won Best Soundtrack at the 4th Annual Indie Soap Awards; and it took Outstanding Composer, Outstanding Producer, and Outstanding Sound Design at LA Webfest 2012. It screened at Outfest, NewFest, the Rainbow Film Festival of Ogunquit, and the Palm Springs Gay & Lesbian Film Festival. In January 2016, Out named Alex one of its "30 Most Eligible Gay TV Characters", after naming Baur to its Out100 list in 2015.¹

On IMDb the series holds a 7.3/10 rating from about 1,200 votes, with season 2 episodes rating between 7.1 and 8.0.⁶^•¹⁸ The series is currently on hiatus while its makers seek financing and distribution partners; the censored first season has been streamable free on Vimeo, with the uncensored version and DVDs sold through the show's site.¹

Other works titled Hunting Season

Several unrelated productions share the title:

Hunting Season (2025 film), an American action thriller written by Adam Hampton, directed by RJ Collins, and starring Mel Gibson, Sofia Hublitz, Shelley Hennig, and Jordi Mollà. A reclusive survivalist and his daughter rescue a wounded woman from a river and are pursued by a drug lord. It was released in limited theaters and on streaming on December 5, 2025, by Samuel Goldwyn Films, runs 93 minutes, and scored 53% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer and 5.8/10 on IMDb.¹⁹^•²⁰^•²¹
Temporada de Caza (Hunting Season, 2016), an Argentine-Uruguayan-Qatari drama directed by Natalia Garagiola in which a violent teenager, after his mother's death, must spend three months with the hunter father he has not seen in over a decade in southern Argentina. The 92-minute film won one award with one nomination at the Venice Film Festival.²²^•²³
Av Mevsimi (Hunting Season, 2010), a 140-minute Turkish crime drama written and directed by Yavuz Turgul about three homicide detectives whose lives are upended during a murder investigation, starring Şener Şen, Cem Yılmaz, and Çetin Tekindor.²⁴
Hunting Season (game show), a 2021 format from Talpa Studios and StukTV in which a celebrity duo flees three prison guards for four hours while wearing GPS transmitters; it aired on SBS6 and Amazon Prime Video and was sold to broadcasters in Belgium, Spain, Lithuania, Poland, and Serbia.²⁵
"Hunting Season" (SOKO Cologne episode), a 45-minute German crime episode, distributed by ZDF Studios, in which detectives investigate the shooting death of a young animal-rights activist with a hunting gun.²⁶
The Hunting Season (1935), a Van Beuren Rainbow Parade animated short directed by Burt Gillett and Tom Palmer with music by Winston Sharples.²⁷
The Hunting Season (play), a play by Magaly Colimon presented by Conch Shell Productions at the Planet Connections Theatre Festivity, about a Haitian mother who has a premonition that her son will be killed by police on his 18th birthday.²⁸

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026