Missing in Action

By James Poniewozik

In Over There, the FX drama about an American unit fighting in Iraq, a soldier making a video e-mail complains about being stuck "in the middle of got-damn downtown s___ville." The military censor cuts him off, saying he's not allowed to divulge his location. He's incredulous. "You see any signs for Downtown S___ville?" She's unmoved. "If you can't follow the rules," she says flatly, "you can't send the message."

That, more or less, has been the case with treating any current war on series TV. During Vietnam, M*A*S*H satirized the Korean War, while on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour Pete Seeger sang Waist Deep in the Big Muddy, a protest song nominally about World War II. Hogan's Heroes, China Beach, even Operation Petticoat took place years after the hostilities. Only old wars were ready for prime time.

Over There (Wednesdays, 10 p.m. E.T.), however, gives away its location specifically and graphically. It references Abu Ghraib and includes a female soldier with a disturbingly Lynndie England--ish streak. An insurgent is hit by a projectile that vaporizes him from the waist up; his legs totter a few ghastly steps before collapsing. All this was nearly too much even for executive producer Steven Bochco (Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue) when FX pitched him the idea. The show, he worried, "would by its very nature tend to be political if not politicized." He finally decided that the basic human drama was like that in his cop shows, and the content was ugly but necessary. "Without dramatizing the consequences of terrible, violent events," he says, "you aren't doing your job."

Over There does its job--but only to a point. As Bochco promises, there is no editorializing beyond the standard war-is-hell variety. (There have been far more pointed comments on the war on FX's big-network brother, Fox. Arrested Development has satirized the war repeatedly, while 24 explored wartime torture in excruciating detail.) Any partisan objections will probably have to do with what it omits: for doves, big-picture considerations like the phantom WMD; for hawks, any attention to good news from Iraq.

Instead, Over There focuses, to borrow Donald Rumsfeld's phrase, on the narrow "soda straw" of the grunts' experience--a fog of war both physical and moral, with the only sure thing the desire to stay alive. The battle scenes may be the most visceral (literally) and gripping that series TV has ever done. As scary as the battle is the uncertainty. In one episode, the unit works at a checkpoint, unsure if they have killed good guys or bad guys even after they search the bullet-shattered cars. The show's power, of course, comes from knowing that these ugly scenes may be playing out, starring someone's brother or sister or child--or your own--right now.

Soldiers need clarity--direct orders, an identifiable enemy. Here they are caught between a command that makes ludicrous demands (at one point, they are ordered not to return fire when shot at because al-Jazeera is taping) and an enemy that preys on their decency, hiding behind civilians. Even personal morality gets upended. The soldier who keeps calling Arabs "sand niggers," for instance, is black.

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

With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles