Over There - TV Review

Is bringing a show to the air about a current crisis, in which people are dying every day, exploitation? Not necessarily. I believe that if a writer has something to say through drama or uses his medium to show you something about the current event that you may not know, through realism, then it's completely valid. The problem with Over There, TV master Steven Bochco's newest program, the pilot of which was written and directed by Chris Gerolmo (Mississippi Burning), is that it never justifies its existence creatively (at least in the pilot, also available on DVD next Tuesday, August 2nd). The show's not a political statement, not really choosing a side in the current war, but it's too stylized to be called realism. So, what's the point?

I wanted Over There to be a realistic portrait of war, and I do believe that some of it is, but Gerolmo falls into too many stereotypical traps. The squad that we spend the pilot with is filled with classic war characters like the yelling sergeant, the quarterback nice kid, and the writer/singer. In the pilot, none of the characters feel real enough to call Over There realism. I believe that what they go through, including some of the most horrific things you'll ever see on television, is realistic. They got the technical aspect down, but they didn't spend any time with the characters and their dialogue. I don't believe that people are rushing Iraqi soldiers screaming "we didn't come for your oil, we came to kick your ass!" That's TV dialogue, not the realistic portrayal this show could have used to be successful. All the characters fall into typical TV characters and dialogue. We know Bochco knows how to write characters from the great years of NYPD Blue and Hill Street Blues, so perhaps we should give him more time but these characters need to move beyond the two-dimensions they're given in the pilot for this show to work at all. Perhaps Bochco didn't want to hit too close to home or perhaps they knew they had to "pump things up" for television, but that raises the specter of exploitation again. And when Gerolmo, in the making-of extra on the DVD, says that the war has "all the drama of Law & Order" and "all the gore of C.S.I.", you can't help but feel like our soldiers are being used for TV fodder.

One way they could have fought the exploitation argument would be to make a point dramatically, either just about the horrors of war in general or to pick a side politically about the current engagement. Writers and directors of war movies use those soldier archetypes (the yelling sergeant, the hero quarterback, etc.) all the time to make larger points about war. But Bochco and Gerolmo don't take the chance of alienating anyone so the whole episode, with its sparse, stereotypical characterization feels more like a technical exercise than a dramatic statement of any kind. I can completely understand not wanting to take a political side with a wound as fresh as the nightly news but if you're not going to give me realism, you need to give me interesting, dramatic texture, otherwise, Over There ends up being what we really don't want when our kids are dying on a daily basis, an action show.

On that level, from an action standpoint, Over There satisfies, with its very well orchestrated battle scenes, and refusal to sugarcoat any of the death on the field. But saying that Over There is technically masterful doesn't seem good enough because it needs to be more than that to not be exploitation. What's going on right now on the other side of the world, no matter how you feel about it politically, is a lot more than a technical exercise, and the first dramatic undertaking about it needs to be more as well. Bochco could turn this around. Round out your characters and don't make them soldier archetypes that we've seen before. Give us a realistic portrayal with characters that we care about because we can identify with them and Over There could work. It would be brutal week in and week out to portray war realistically, including on the character level, but the wound's too fresh for anything else to work. Maybe I'm holding Over There to a higher standard than most television, considering how well made it is technically, but with episodes of the program leading into news stories about real people dying over there, it needs to be better than your average pilot and it's just not there yet.