'Over There,' far
but not far enough
Hyper-real Iraq war drama avoids the question
By Steven Rosen
You could tell this FX Iraq war drama would be tough-minded early in its first episode, when Army soldier mechanic Esmerelda “Doublewide” Del Rio tries to explain to her infant where she’s being sent to.
The child, seated in the kitchen, has no concept of Iraq, so she tries to compare it to something far away that’s still in his realm of sight. “Mommy’s going to be way over there in the garbage,” she says.
As the first three episodes in this new Wednesday-night series from Steven Bochco (“Hill Street Blues,” “NYPD Blue”) have subsequently revealed, she was being gentle in her description. The Iraq in this series looks apocalyptically hellish.
This is brave, risky television, turning an actual contemporaneous war into a dramatic series with fictional characters while Americans and Iraqis are dying there every day. Nobody did this two years into Vietnam. To his great credit, Bochco succeeds in being painfully, unflinchingly truthful in the show’s depiction of that war. It’s a dose of reality at a time when the networks are clogged with so-called reality shows filled with escapist song-and-dance fantasies.
Yet so far it isn’t brave enough. Bochco has said he didn’t want the series to be political, but it’s impossible to watch these soldiers kill or be killed and not wonder what they’re thinking about--whether the war can be won, whether it’s making their families safer at home in the larger war against terrorism, or whether it was a tactical mistake. There are plenty of reasons why Bochco didn’t want to go there. But in a crucial way “Over There” isn’t really relevant unless he goes there, because the nation itself is asking those questions.
The Iraq of “Over There” is a godforsaken landscape full of orange-red skies brought on by endless dust storms and parched brown earth that appears eternally untouched by rain. (“Over There” is filmed in California.) The ruthless insurgent enemy is holed up in mosques, driving bomb-packed cars at night, firing guns from the hidden rooftops and alleyways of otherwise-deserted villages, and out to kill, kill, kill.
The series, which has also been shaped by co-creator/writer/director (and melancholy theme-song composer) Chris Gerolmo, has a grimly ultra-realistic, even existential, view of war. It’s all about survival.
Tonight’s episode, “Roadblock Duty,” is incredibly wrenching as a handful of soldiers at an isolated post tensely, testily wait for Iraqi cars to approach them. Anyone can be the enemy; any car booby-trapped. Sharply edited, the episode is all edgy fear and desperation.
With this and next week’s “The Prisoner” the personalities of the core characters begin to emerge past initial stereotypes. All are well-acted and have pithy, provocative dialogue – the Vin Diesel-like Erik Palladino as the intense Sergeant Scream; Luke Macfarlane as the doubting “Dim” Dumphy; Josh Henderson as the naively idealistic Bo Rider; Kirk “Sticky” Jones as the street-smart ghetto kid “Smoke”; Keith Robinson as the sweet-voiced and -tempered “Angel” King; Nicki Aycox as “Mrs. B”; and Lizette Carrion as soldier mechanic “Doublewide.”
Tonight’s episode introduces a new soldier, Omid Abtahi’s Arab-American Tariq Nassiri, who speaks what may become “Over There’s” most famous line. Explaining the motivation of the suicidal Arab Jihadists, he says, “It’s like being a hippie in 1969 and then hearing about Woodstock. How could you not go?”
In tone, “Over There” is much closer to the film “Black Hawk Down” than to the humane dark humor of the landmark TV series “M*A*S*H.” Yet “M*A*S*H,” set during the Korean War but first broadcast during Vietnam, did something that hasn’t yet been done in this series. It allowed its characters to wonder why they were, indeed, over there.
We learn tonight that several of “Over There’s” soldiers enlisted after 9/11, but we don’t know if they still think they made the right choice.
With its violence and language, the series is rated MA, unsuitable for anyone under 17. In the first episode, an insurgent is bloodily ripped in half by a mortar and Bo loses half his leg from a roadside bomb. In tonight’s episode, he rips out his IV and blood sprays across his hospital room’s windows. As he reaches to wipe it up, he falls out of his bed and screams.
It’s a vision of war that’s hard to forget.
