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Pack your bags. We're going to Washington to make some news!

— Sophie


The Leverage team puts the sting on callous tabloid newscaster Monica Hunter, tapping into government-conspiracy paranoia as leverage.

The Client[]

  • Ray Pennington: a bus driver and former Iraqi war vet vilified on the tabloid television show Hunt for the Truth after a minor traffic accident involving the school bus he drives.
  • Sarah Pennington: Ray's daughter, who has just seen her father nearly commit suicide due to his ruined reputation by Monica Hunter's hands,

The Mark[]

Monica Hunter, host of Hunt for the Truth, a fear-mongering daily television program on the BNI network. Monica builds her ratings, and feeds her audience fear, by demonizing innocent people, using a combination of manipulated facts, sensational video and "expert" commentary. Monica yearns for respect as a journalist, but is the butt of jokes among the community of serious journalists.

Locations[]

  • Washington, DC
    • BNI Washington Broadcast Center
    • Pennington Residence
    • Apartment belonging to "Wade Perkins"
    • The Pentagon
  • Fort Menig

Guest Cast[]

  • Beth Broderick as Monica Hunter
  • Ayanna Berkshire as Sarah Pennington

Aliases[]

  • Eliot: Earl
  • Hardison: Wade Perkins
  • Nate: Gen. Mark Chessler
  • Parker: Cindy MacAllen

Episode Notes[]

  • The Monica Hunter character is a thinly-disguised roman à clef of HLN's Nancy Grace and her eponymous television program. Grace, a former Fulton County, GA prosecutor who gave up studying English to become an attorney when her fiance was murdered, uses methods similar to Hunter's to vilify her subjects from what she describes as a "victim's rights" point of view. Grace has drawn praise for her work, but also generated considerable controversy, often related to her sensational approach to events, loose connections to the truth, and rigid assumptions that the victim is always an innocent.
  • In this episode, the team switches their usual roles

Trivia[]

  • The news room used in the episode belongs to Portland's KGW (Channel 8). KGW anchor Joe Donlon appears as himself, interviewing the client at the end of the episode. His blog describes his experiences on-set. (Note: the link goes to an archived version at the Internet Archive.)
  • Hardison quotes the iconic introduction of The Outer Limits when he hacks into the television network. "Do not adjust your sets. I control the horizontal. I control the vertical."
  • Project Destiny was a reference to the Science Fiction film "The Core", which was written by John Rogers.
  • This is the third time Timothy Hutton who plays Nate Ford has been seen wearing an Army uniform. Hutton first wore one when he appeared in the 1981 movie, Taps as Cadet Major Brian Moreland and again, four years later in the 1985 movie, "Turk 182".
  • When broadcasting Hunter's footage, Hardison says "Do not adjust your set." This is a reference to a line from James Cameron's Dark Angel on which the character Eyes Only repeated says "Do not attempt to adjust your set." at the beginning of each broadcast.
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