thedrifter
07-25-05, 07:23 AM
War Out Of Harm's Way
FX's new drama 'Over There' refrains from taking political shots at the war in Iraq and merely uses it as a setting for the human story
July 24, 2005
BY DIANE WERTS, Staff Writer
CHATSWORTH, Calif. -- War is hell, everywhere. It's hell in the trenches American soldiers dig in the sands of Iraq as enemy rounds pound their position. It's hell in the hospitals where amputees lie screaming after the morphine wears off. It's hell back home as spouses left behind struggle to cope with kids, infidelity, uncertainty.
And in its own relatively insignificant way, war is also hell on those making a TV series aspiring to depict all those military realities in searing fashion. The temperature is 106 degrees in the parched desert flatland between the California mountain canyons 30 miles north of Hollywood and 180 degrees removed from the comfortable studio soundstages on which most shows shoot. Though new million-dollar houses are perched on overlooking cliffs, getting down here to tumbleweed country means following a long and bumpy dirt road. It ends at a sand-strewn, dust-filled "town" of primitive adobe edifices made of wood, plaster and set painters' ingenuity. The only respite from the broiling sun is a small canvas tent sheltering a few $5 plastic lawn chairs and a picnic cooler.
"Over There" faces quite a challenge in premiering this week on FX (Wednesday at 10 p.m.), after audiences already have seen war rendered with big-budget verisimilitude in "Saving Private Ryan," "Band of Brothers" and "Platoon." And this series doesn't re-create just a far-flung battle locale, but one in which hostilities continue to rage. As Southern California stands in for Iraq, these actors represent something even more crucial to the drama's truth: American soldiers, halfway around the world, mostly young, feeling foreign, wading through inscrutable situations.
The 13-episode series created by Chris Gerolmo, screenwriter of "Mississippi Burning," and Steven Bochco, famed producer of "Hill Street Blues" and "NYPD Blue," is not about America's war in Iraq. It's about the "boots on the ground" fighting on that war's front lines. The distinction is something both partners stress as they eat lunch up the hill from their pseudo-Iraqi village in a large tent blessed with that ultimate in American comfort: cool breezes blasting out of massive plastic ducts snaked from air-conditioning trucks outside.
"I don't want to politicize the show in any way," Bochco insists in his firm, businesslike manner. "I don't think it's relevant to the dramatization of this war, of the men and women who are in uniform and in harm's way." The more casual Gerolmo, who directed the first two episodes and scripted many others, doesn't even think of his mission as writing about war, although that's the setting in which these 20-something characters find themselves.
Meeting the troops
He sees "an opportunity, creatively, to watch people who are yet unformed, encountering these kinds of incredibly difficult and extreme circumstances and choices, and changing and growing as a result of it."
We meet the soldiers as they ship out to Iraq in an array that includes a swaggering hip-hop dude (Kirk "Sticky" Jones, aka rapper Sticky Fingaz), a married college graduate (Luke Macfarlane), a new mother (Lizette Carrion) and a Texas football stud (Josh Henderson). Winding up with a leader they call Sgt. Scream (Erik Palladino, "ER's" Doctor Dave), they discover he's tough but tender and not thrilled to inherit them when their assigned sergeant has his tonsils taken out.
These may sound like convenient archetypes, but they're delivered with the same textured resonance that's been the hallmark of FX's recent run of quality dramas. "The Shield" hit the mean streets of Los Angeles with cops who are good guys and bad guys simultaneously. "Nip/Tuck" explored the meaning of identity in a society obsessed with physical perfection. "Rescue Me" went inside the heads of New York firefighters in the wake of Sept. 11. Those shows share a cultural undercurrent that inspired this new drama's creation.
"They were all about contemporary American issues and reality," says FX president John Landgraf, who has come to see that perspective as the channel's "emerging brand." "Thinking about contemporary American reality," he says, "you have to be struck by the fact that we're in a war." And it's a war distinct from those portrayed in such previous TV series as the World War II saga "Combat!" (ABC, 1962-67) and the Vietnam war "Tour of Duty" (CBS, 1987-90). Besides taking place two decades after the eras they depicted, those shows exemplified a different style of war. "So much has changed," says Landgraf. "Tactics. Women in the theater of combat. The cultural milieu."
In Gerolmo's pilot, the "public relations" of live Al-Jazeera satellite coverage gets in the way of military decisions. Women soldiers working behind the lines as a driver and a mechanic find themselves in an infantry firefight. Next week's episode introduces an Arab-American private who's regarded with suspicion by some of his countrymen. He's a combat soldier who gets pressed into service translating both the language and customs of an Iraqi people for whom he feels no affinity. Says Gerolmo, "He seems to be backpedaling away from his heritage."
That second episode also broadens the story's scope considerably. The unit gets up close with both Iraqi civilians and terrorists while manning a roadblock where split-second decisions prove imperative. Other settings are more prominently woven into the mix, including a German hospital to which a wounded soldier is sent and the base back home where spouses' support groups now welcome husbands of deployed wives. "The pilot is sort of 95 percent Iraq and five minutes at the beginning domestically," Gerolmo says. "By the end of the second show, you get a real feel for the balance of the series, which is more like 60-40."
In the third episode, on Aug. 10, the unit is stranded in a town run by a lone-wolf American interrogator whose methods of extracting information from captured insurgents may seem extreme. Future weeks focus on embedded reporters, prison conditions, kidnappings and the perils of delivering portable toilets.
Getting into a military mind-set
To authenticate its warfront depictions, "Over There" relies on technical adviser and former Marine staff sergeant Sean Bunch, whose 10 years of service included a combat tour in Iraq. Bunch put the cast through a week of mini-boot camp to get them into the military mindset. Cast regular Lombardo Boyar says he was actually in the Army's 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg after the Gulf War in the early 1990s. "It taught me I didn't want to work hard for a living," the El Paso, Texas, native says with a grin, "so I became an actor." But Boyar ironically plays a husband left behind on base and thus appears in no army scenes. Omid Abtahi might also have access to some background color to inform his portrayal of the Arab-American soldier. His younger brother just finished six years in the army and "came back a completely different person," says the Iran-born, Houston-raised actor. "God bless the show. At least I have some things we can talk about."
Things about which "Over There" viewers also might talk. Bochco says: "What art is supposed to do is ask provocative questions. The moment you take a political position, you're providing answers." The freedom FX allows its producers in terms of language, violence and other adult content enables them to vividly picture the impact of warfare, Bochco says, "somewhat more realistically than you would be able to on network television. It obviously makes for a stronger, more realistic show."
Yet the point here isn't current events, it's people. "Whether it's urban crime or a conflict in Iraq," Bochco says, "it always comes down to characters - individual stories about courage, about failure of courage, about making decisions, right decisions, wrong decisions. It's stories about the way what you're doing has emotional, physical, psychological, economic impact, and on your family at home. To that extent, the war becomes the environment, as opposed to a story that has a beginning, middle and end."
And this war, of course, rages on.
Ellie
FX's new drama 'Over There' refrains from taking political shots at the war in Iraq and merely uses it as a setting for the human story
July 24, 2005
BY DIANE WERTS, Staff Writer
CHATSWORTH, Calif. -- War is hell, everywhere. It's hell in the trenches American soldiers dig in the sands of Iraq as enemy rounds pound their position. It's hell in the hospitals where amputees lie screaming after the morphine wears off. It's hell back home as spouses left behind struggle to cope with kids, infidelity, uncertainty.
And in its own relatively insignificant way, war is also hell on those making a TV series aspiring to depict all those military realities in searing fashion. The temperature is 106 degrees in the parched desert flatland between the California mountain canyons 30 miles north of Hollywood and 180 degrees removed from the comfortable studio soundstages on which most shows shoot. Though new million-dollar houses are perched on overlooking cliffs, getting down here to tumbleweed country means following a long and bumpy dirt road. It ends at a sand-strewn, dust-filled "town" of primitive adobe edifices made of wood, plaster and set painters' ingenuity. The only respite from the broiling sun is a small canvas tent sheltering a few $5 plastic lawn chairs and a picnic cooler.
"Over There" faces quite a challenge in premiering this week on FX (Wednesday at 10 p.m.), after audiences already have seen war rendered with big-budget verisimilitude in "Saving Private Ryan," "Band of Brothers" and "Platoon." And this series doesn't re-create just a far-flung battle locale, but one in which hostilities continue to rage. As Southern California stands in for Iraq, these actors represent something even more crucial to the drama's truth: American soldiers, halfway around the world, mostly young, feeling foreign, wading through inscrutable situations.
The 13-episode series created by Chris Gerolmo, screenwriter of "Mississippi Burning," and Steven Bochco, famed producer of "Hill Street Blues" and "NYPD Blue," is not about America's war in Iraq. It's about the "boots on the ground" fighting on that war's front lines. The distinction is something both partners stress as they eat lunch up the hill from their pseudo-Iraqi village in a large tent blessed with that ultimate in American comfort: cool breezes blasting out of massive plastic ducts snaked from air-conditioning trucks outside.
"I don't want to politicize the show in any way," Bochco insists in his firm, businesslike manner. "I don't think it's relevant to the dramatization of this war, of the men and women who are in uniform and in harm's way." The more casual Gerolmo, who directed the first two episodes and scripted many others, doesn't even think of his mission as writing about war, although that's the setting in which these 20-something characters find themselves.
Meeting the troops
He sees "an opportunity, creatively, to watch people who are yet unformed, encountering these kinds of incredibly difficult and extreme circumstances and choices, and changing and growing as a result of it."
We meet the soldiers as they ship out to Iraq in an array that includes a swaggering hip-hop dude (Kirk "Sticky" Jones, aka rapper Sticky Fingaz), a married college graduate (Luke Macfarlane), a new mother (Lizette Carrion) and a Texas football stud (Josh Henderson). Winding up with a leader they call Sgt. Scream (Erik Palladino, "ER's" Doctor Dave), they discover he's tough but tender and not thrilled to inherit them when their assigned sergeant has his tonsils taken out.
These may sound like convenient archetypes, but they're delivered with the same textured resonance that's been the hallmark of FX's recent run of quality dramas. "The Shield" hit the mean streets of Los Angeles with cops who are good guys and bad guys simultaneously. "Nip/Tuck" explored the meaning of identity in a society obsessed with physical perfection. "Rescue Me" went inside the heads of New York firefighters in the wake of Sept. 11. Those shows share a cultural undercurrent that inspired this new drama's creation.
"They were all about contemporary American issues and reality," says FX president John Landgraf, who has come to see that perspective as the channel's "emerging brand." "Thinking about contemporary American reality," he says, "you have to be struck by the fact that we're in a war." And it's a war distinct from those portrayed in such previous TV series as the World War II saga "Combat!" (ABC, 1962-67) and the Vietnam war "Tour of Duty" (CBS, 1987-90). Besides taking place two decades after the eras they depicted, those shows exemplified a different style of war. "So much has changed," says Landgraf. "Tactics. Women in the theater of combat. The cultural milieu."
In Gerolmo's pilot, the "public relations" of live Al-Jazeera satellite coverage gets in the way of military decisions. Women soldiers working behind the lines as a driver and a mechanic find themselves in an infantry firefight. Next week's episode introduces an Arab-American private who's regarded with suspicion by some of his countrymen. He's a combat soldier who gets pressed into service translating both the language and customs of an Iraqi people for whom he feels no affinity. Says Gerolmo, "He seems to be backpedaling away from his heritage."
That second episode also broadens the story's scope considerably. The unit gets up close with both Iraqi civilians and terrorists while manning a roadblock where split-second decisions prove imperative. Other settings are more prominently woven into the mix, including a German hospital to which a wounded soldier is sent and the base back home where spouses' support groups now welcome husbands of deployed wives. "The pilot is sort of 95 percent Iraq and five minutes at the beginning domestically," Gerolmo says. "By the end of the second show, you get a real feel for the balance of the series, which is more like 60-40."
In the third episode, on Aug. 10, the unit is stranded in a town run by a lone-wolf American interrogator whose methods of extracting information from captured insurgents may seem extreme. Future weeks focus on embedded reporters, prison conditions, kidnappings and the perils of delivering portable toilets.
Getting into a military mind-set
To authenticate its warfront depictions, "Over There" relies on technical adviser and former Marine staff sergeant Sean Bunch, whose 10 years of service included a combat tour in Iraq. Bunch put the cast through a week of mini-boot camp to get them into the military mindset. Cast regular Lombardo Boyar says he was actually in the Army's 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg after the Gulf War in the early 1990s. "It taught me I didn't want to work hard for a living," the El Paso, Texas, native says with a grin, "so I became an actor." But Boyar ironically plays a husband left behind on base and thus appears in no army scenes. Omid Abtahi might also have access to some background color to inform his portrayal of the Arab-American soldier. His younger brother just finished six years in the army and "came back a completely different person," says the Iran-born, Houston-raised actor. "God bless the show. At least I have some things we can talk about."
Things about which "Over There" viewers also might talk. Bochco says: "What art is supposed to do is ask provocative questions. The moment you take a political position, you're providing answers." The freedom FX allows its producers in terms of language, violence and other adult content enables them to vividly picture the impact of warfare, Bochco says, "somewhat more realistically than you would be able to on network television. It obviously makes for a stronger, more realistic show."
Yet the point here isn't current events, it's people. "Whether it's urban crime or a conflict in Iraq," Bochco says, "it always comes down to characters - individual stories about courage, about failure of courage, about making decisions, right decisions, wrong decisions. It's stories about the way what you're doing has emotional, physical, psychological, economic impact, and on your family at home. To that extent, the war becomes the environment, as opposed to a story that has a beginning, middle and end."
And this war, of course, rages on.
Ellie