Bochco's Over There Bombs With Current Military Personnel
Dean
I taped the new dramatic show on Iraq, "Over There," having heard some good things about it. But before even seeing it, I begin to think I may have wasted my time recording it, since the military bloggers who saw it and many I don't all seem to think it was awful. John Donovan has a review and roundup.
The consensus seems to be: stuck in 30 years out of date ideas about the military and filled with stupid cliches that have nothing to do with the everyday life of someone serving in Iraq.
Oh well.
PIMF!
The show had some terrible overwriting, but it's absurd to reject it because a handful of soldier-bloggers dislike it. What next? We poll pathologists and crime scene techs in order to decide how we feel about CSI?
It's fiction. It's either good fiction or bad fiction, make your own call on that. I don't have a dog in that fight, but from where I sat it beat most of what's on.
And by the way, aspiring TV writer? Get used to it. I don't think I've been surprised by a plot in about a decade. There are compensations: you can learn the work from watching how other writers try to beat the limitations of a genre.
Oh, and for the record? If working pathologists and crime scene techs mock a show like CSI, I take it seriously and think twice about watching the show. Difference being: people in the business actually do like CSI. Also, I happen to know that a lot of working ER docs and nurses liked shows like E.R., and a lot of cops loved shows like Hill Street Blues. They all recognized it as dramatic fiction, but they also recognize that it wasn't stupid and didn't insult them and their profession.
I well remember a night I spent in a hospital watching E.R. with a bunch of nurses. They loved the show. Yes they recognized that it was dramatized and not always 100% on the money. But they recognized themselves and people they knew in it, and that made it something worth watching--indeed, something they practically glued themselves to.
The show's only done one episode. I think the tendency of people with expertise in a field being portrayed -- soldier, cop, doctor -- is to pooh pooh anything that offers a flawed perspective at first, then to grudgingly accept it later on.
"Real" people don't always get that fiction operates on very different rules. Real life doesn't arrange itself into neat one hour segments, or demand an "A plot, B plot" structure. Nor do they get that of course if you have 44 minutes of air time (an hour minus commercials, depending on the network) that you can devote only so much time to character development, so on the first round it'll be sketchy and tend, even with good writers, to come across as cliche.
That having been said, the pilot was flawed. The florid dialog bothered me. The Sergeant character bothered me. The angry black guy character was troubling. There were one or two other characters that looked like they might work out, although they blew the leg off one of them. Structurally it looked sound, by which I mean that it is built well enough to last over multiple episodes. Production values were as good as you can get on a realistic budget.
As for soldiers who like the show? I haven't pursued that. I'll ask my Dad to watch it, get his take, although he's a Nam guy. But I suspect you'll see military opinion roll toward the favorable as soon as they get over the "Hey, that's not how it is," reaction and settle into the "At least someone is trying to show our lives," reaction.
Anyway, you should take a look, I'd be interested in your reaction. And FX is rerunnning the damned thing twelve times a day.
I won't be watching the show, I've got better things to do than support a show that insults our people in the field and that contains wild inaccuracies that are easy to spot within the first few minutes.
A person can be a terrific soldier and yet have nothing particularly relevant or insightful to say on the subject of a TV show -- even a show that is related to his own area of expertise. There are 140,000 different individual experiences of US soldiers and Marines in Iraq. Only a tiny handful of those people are bloggers, only a tinier portion still have seen this show. You're having your opinions dictated to you by people whose bona fides you don't know, who may be grinding axes you cannot guess at.
I haven't written about the show because although I watched the pilot, I know enough about TV and series in general to know that you can't form a valid opinion till you've seen more than one. You're forming an opinion having seen none. How are you any different than the various right wing and left wing scolds who denounce music they've never heard and books they've never read?
I've got precious little free time these days, and I have no interest in wasting it on a show that professional soldiers and combat veterans who I know and respect have so eloquently and in great detail explained as inaccurate, insulting, condescending, and nasty. You, on the other hand, can go on your merry way enjoying a show that you know for a fact that people who've actually served over there think is garbage because, after all, you're so much smarter than them and you "get" TV in a way that they're just too dumb to grok. Enjoy. I won't be joining you.