Peacock is elevating a campus game of stalking and suspicion into a competition TV show.
In a statement Tuesday, the NBCUniversal streaming network said it has greenlit Assassins, an unscripted series inspired by the elimination game Assassin, which has enthralled high schools and colleges worldwide for decades. Academy Award-nominated actress Scarlett Johansson is serving as an executive producer, along with Brien Meagher and Rhett Bachner, co-founders of B17 Entertainment, the producers of the series. B17 Entertainment is under Sony Pictures Television.
From the moment they enter the arena, every player is assigned a target: one person they must eliminate before the season ends, Peacock says. But the killer catch here is that every hunter is being hunted as well, and nobody can ever feel safe. Contenders will navigate through shifting alliances and trickery, with just the shrewdest player emerging victorious.
Peacock didn’t clarify how the show eliminates the target. In the actual game, also known as Killer, players stalk their target with weapons like water pistols and foam dart guns. Once a player eliminates the target, the target’s own target automatically becomes their next target. The game continues until just one player remains.
The game is highly popular at college campuses, with some colleges having Assassins’ Guild clubs to organize such games. Steve Jackson Games published a rulebook called Killer: The Game of Assassination in the early 1980s, but the game is believed to have originated with the 1965 Italian movie The 10th Victim.
However, its most recent revival comes from the Senior Assassin game, which senior-year high schoolers play using water guns in the weeks leading up to graduation. Videos of the game have gone viral on TikTok, and there’s now even an app tracking video evidence of kills and participants’ scores, according to The Irish Times, which reported in May that the craze had hit Ireland.
The game has also raised warnings from police, who said in 2024 that players were switching out water guns with paintball and airsoft guns that look like real guns.
The game format mimics Peacock’s highly-rated reality series, The Traitors, hosted by Alan Cumming, which won the Emmy for Outstanding Reality Competition Program in 2024. In the show, players compete to reveal the secret traitor(s).
But while Johansson may be more familiar to audiences for movies like Marriage Story and Jojo Rabbit, she has increasingly worked behind the scenes. She made her feature directing debut with 2025’s Eleanor the Great. She was recently signed on as an executive producer on a comedy series with her husband, Colin Jost, and Danny Chung, who earlier created The Office. Variety reported that the project was produced outside the Hollywood studio system with financing from brand deals.
Meagher and Bachner started their production company in 2013 after collaborating on ABC’s Shark Tank. Their shows include Netflix’s The History of Swear Words with Nicolas Cage, the crafting and baking competitions Craftopia and Baketopia for HBO Max, and Thanks a Million with Jennifer Lopez.
Peacock hasn’t revealed a host, premiere date, or cast for Assassins yet.
