'Over There' on TV Over Here

War movies are a staple of the Hollywood big screen, but television has rarely touched the topic. There was Combat, set during World War II, which ran from 1962-1967. The Rat Patrol, also set during that war, ran from 1966-1968. M*A*S*H, set during the Korean War and based on the Academy Award-winning movie of 1970, ran from 1972-1983 and was one of the highest-rated shows of all time, but it was only peripherally about war.

A First for TV
All of that makes Over There unique. This story purports to be about a U.S. Army squad in today's Iraq, and because it's a Steven Bochco production (NYPD Blue), the words gritty and realistic are often attached to it. And while it's certainly gritty, realistic it's not (more on that in a bit). Still, because it's for TV, it also purports to entertain—if you consider the HBO standard of violence, bad language and sexual situations "entertaining." Co-creator and head writer Chris Gerolmo told The Wall Street Journal, "War has everything you need for television: the drama of Law & Order, the action of 24 and the blood of CSI."

Underline the blood part. The first episode of Over There shows an Iraqi guerilla being hit in the chest by a 40mm grenade; his upper body disintegrates in a gory mist while his legs run on for a few more steps. (The camera later lingers on those bloody appendages lying in the dirt.) Another guerilla is shot square in the middle of the forehead. An American soldier has his lower leg blown off by a roadside bomb, and the limb hangs by a bloody sinew as the medics load him onto a stretcher. In the second episode, a huge raven picks at the dead flesh of two terrorists, and we see a little girl with the back of her head blown off.

While language-wise this isn't The Sopranos or Deadwood—in other words, no f-words—every other profanity makes at least one appearance, with "g--d--n" used several dozen times per episode. Viewers are also confronted with fairly explicit sexual situations between married and unmarried couples featuring various stages of undress and sexual motions.

Comic Book War
As far as the show's realism goes, try again. The characters in Over There are pretty much from cliché central casting—for example, the tough-but-fair sergeant who yells at everyone and the incompetent, by-the-book lieutenant. They all have oh-so-cute nicknames, too. (The aforementioned sergeant's is "Sgt. Scream," and a female soldier's is "Doublewide" because of a certain portion of her anatomy.)

The situations that writer Gerolmo puts these soldiers in are preposterous, and their actions under fire even more so. Granted, it's been 30 years since I was a Marine Corps grunt, but things can't have changed that much. For example, Gerolmo has a single fire team of four rookie soldiers (and two female drivers accidentally trapped with them) as the sole blocking force for a group of al-Qaeda fanatics holed up in a mosque. The soldiers have no heavy weapons support or backup, and they attack under cover of a mortar barrage without anyone actually coordinating with the mortar battery. (Talk about friendly-fire casualties!) A truck carrying soldiers on an illicit mission to secure moonshine runs over a landmine that was conveniently marked by a little white flag. (Puh-leeze!)

In short, Over There plays like it was written by someone whose understanding of soldiers and combat comes only from old Hollywood movies and Sgt. Rock comic books. Gerolmo did, however, apparently read Evan Wright's book Generation Kill, about the reporter's experience with a Marine reconnaissance unit in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Gerolmo seemingly draws two anecdotes directly from that book: soldiers chewing instant-coffee crystals directly from the foil pouch, and the advice on where and how to defecate while in a combat zone.

Over There borrows its title from the World War I rallying cry written by George M. Cohan: "We won't come back till it's over over there." That song has a sense of mission and moral purpose, which is completely missing in this series. Bochco disclaimed, "Ultimately, a young man being shot at in a firefight has absolutely no interest in politics." While on its surface this might seem plausible, on deeper inspection it implies that soldiers care about no higher cause—clearly false if you ask soldiers why they joined the Army. Setting aside for a moment the show's content issues (which is almost impossible considering how extreme they are for TV), it's that moral ambiguity that kills this series.