Television: Missing in Action

(2 of 2)

So Over There is raw and brave. But it is not yet good, in the plain old sense of creating three-dimensional characters, as FX's The Shield, Nip/Tuck and Rescue Me have. To a man and woman, the soldiers are types--the hard-bitten sarge, the college kid, the greenhorn, the choirboy--whom the pilot introduces with the inexcusably hackneyed device of having them explain their colorful nicknames. In between battles, the scripts--many penned by co-creator Chris Gerolmo (screenwriter of Mississippi Burning)--saddle them with canned Socratic dialogue about race relations and what it means to fight an enemy who's willing to die. The subplots about the families on base are even more trite. On this show, when a dad abandons his wife and kids, he actually says he's going out to get cigarettes.

The show may seem exploitative, but there's a fine line between exploitation and relevance: both involve depicting horrible things that command people's attention. As a first TV draft of history, Over There is far smarter and more unflinching than a sweeps war movie--or for that matter, much network news. But it wants to be more, and should be. Bochco has avoided making an editorial, but in the process he has given us an AP wire story--a clinical, ripped-from-the-headlines drama without the human complexity that allows fiction to add to our understanding of battle. Like certain wars, this drama is a success in strictly military terms. But it has a long way to go to deliver the hearts and minds. --With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles