The Opinionated Bastard

“Only a few characters. The audience has to bond with the characters so having more then 4-5 characters diminishes that bond. In military terms, this means a platoon size is ideal. Naturally, this doesn’t always make sense in reality. Why was a captain commanding a platoon in Saving Private Ryan?”

Presumably you mean a squad when you say platoon. A squad is roughly 10 soldiers, a platoon is 3 squads, or roughly 30-40 soldiers. A captain commands a company, or three-four platoons (roughly 150 soldiers). 4-5 soldiers would actually be a ‘team’ or ‘section’ (1/2 of a squad).

Steve

I haven’t seen the show yet, but from what I’ve read it’s a little too “Generic” and too willing to bend actuality in preference of Drama. Things could be worse, but they could be a helluva lot better, particularly when you’re portraying something which is actually happening, NOW, rather than years after the fact.

“Tour of Duty”, a CBS Vietnam War show from the early 90s seemed able to dodge a lot of the genre traps that this is apparently falling into.

Also, a minor point, Frank Capra didn’t make any WWII dramas - he made the Renowned series “Why We Fight”, which can be defined as “propoganda”, except that its all pretty much true.

Perhaps the very best War Movie ever made at the squad and platoon level is “BattleGround” - 1949. Pretty unflinching for its time, and full of shades of gray.

Ray Bradbury tells this story about the 13-year-old that came up to him at an SF convention and said “You know in The Martian Chronicles where you have the sun coming up in the west?”

“Yes?”

“Nyahhhh!”

So, I hit him, said Bradbury.

All this millblogger nonsense about accuracy: there would be NO science fiction if the physicists had their way. Especially not howlers like Star Wars or Farscape.


Nobody cares.

Hey, it is Hollywood so the actual manning of platoons and squad and companies doesn’t matter,right?

Here is the deal though. Hollywood could make this show correctly and STILL get the audience they want — it would just take some work on their part and they would rather not do that. Secondly, getting it right matters because too many Americans actually believe what they produce is true.

“The presences of the media is making this war very strange. “

I don’t think that’s accurate, at least not in the way I think you meant it.

There has always been media around wars; what is different this time, is that (1) many of the journalists chose that career for political reasons, following the media’s role in Vietnam and Watergate, and (2) the enemy knows full well how to use our media to their best advantage, and the media seems happy to let them.

I doubt you’ll find any favorable reviews from service members; after the last couple of years, no one in the military is inclined to give the media a break.

Hope the next episode features an obese Iraqi woman singing…

Tour of Duty used a technique that the adventure novelist Alistair Maclean used. He has his three-four central characters surrounded by a dozen or so less important folks but involves the less important closely in the story. It is the job of the less-important to be killed frequently enough to make the reader/viewer aware that this is a dangerous business and the people getting killed are not just anonymous cannon fodder, while leaving the central characters alive so as to maintain continuity.

Over There is going to have to figure out a way to indicate that this is a frequently fatal business or the immediacy of combat will dissipate.

There is yet to be a military-based TV show for which there is not a waiting list of vets to point out the inaccuracies. I usually try to limit my disgust to the stupidly wrong (such as the huge double-wide stairways on the “submarine” in that Martin Sheen disaster “Fifth Missile”) or errors in tone (such as the O-3 yelling at the E-5 and making him do push-ups for not saying “sir” in “Crimson Tide”).

It has always been my feeling that many are pointedly harsh on “Over There” for two main reasons: it is a weekly series concerning a military action that is currently ongoing, and it is being written and produced, if not by individuals who are explicity against the action, at the least in an environment and for an industry that most certainly not only opposed to the action but in recent history objectively anti-military.

[ All this millblogger nonsense about accuracy: there would be NO science fiction if the physicists had their way. Especially not howlers like Star Wars or Farscape.]

Uh, I don’t think the people behind the Over There TV show intended Over There to be science fiction. Or at least, I doubt that they feel flattered when their TV show is drscribed that way.

Sci-Fi … realistic war docu-drama: different genres, geddit?

In Saving Private Ryan, Tom Hanks’ character commanded about seven men, a short squad, not a platoon.

Band of Brothers set the standard. Nothing before or since has even come close.

Note the number of characters in the movie: Platoon

And every other war movie around. You can quibble with me if you want, I’ve never been in the military, but when movies/tv tell a story, there is a multiplier of about 5 to 1. Each character in the story has to represent 5 other people.

The Enterprise in Star Trek has a crew of 400, but you see the same 5 guys every week…

Except for the guys in red shirts who die. I’d rather not have Over There follow the Star Trek model; casualties haven’t been that high in Iraq. One death/season would be about right…

Sorry, but the soldiers are not ‘wrong’ unless you define ‘wrong’ as ‘don’t agree with you’. That seems to be the default setting for a lot of folk these days. The show struck me as a colorized ‘Combat’ for the most part. I won’t be watching it again.

Sci-Fi … realistic war docu-drama: different genres, geddit?

Well, given that you intend to miss my point, I’ll simplify for you.

No genre show is technically accurate. I’m sure there are doctors that roll on the floor watching ER, cops who think CSI is inadmissable, lawyers who … but you get my point.

Who was it who said that when the press writes about something you know about you can see how much they get wrong? Same thing here.

Band of Brothers set the standard. Nothing before or since has even come close.

60 years later! After about 10,000 variations on the theme first. Not to mention an infinitely higher budget and a first-rate book to work from.
Combat! would be a better comparison, so lets get the sterotypes and unrealistic combat complaints out of the way already.

Comparing this to other Genre stuff - ER, Law & Order, and etc. isn’t quite right, I think.

In this case, nobody is going to say that the cops should withdraw from New York City, or that Doctors should evacuate Chicago. Right now there’s a political debate going on, and this show will, regardless of the fact that it is fiction, have strong potential to influence people’s thinking about the war. That’s a real responsibility.

This show may be made to entertain, but right in the first episode, the troops refer to a General making decisions from a remote, safe location, and from what I gather, there’s a hackneyed portray of NCO/Officer conflict.

If you’re going to do a “show” about a real war, going on right now, you’d better be reconciled to taking the “showbiz” out of it. HBO would be a better place for this kind of thing - they seem to know how to do this stuff.

It’s really not the stereotypes which hurt (as in less entertaining) because a stereotype is just a generalization, it is the thoughtlessly used cliches. The lame cliches are all held over from hollywood’s Vietnam war mindset, and have no place in a show about Iraq. Try and think about another tv show set in some European conflict during the 90s which used the same “futility of war” template.

What I would agree with is that the troops are possibly wrong about the Over There show being entertaining television. I would rather watch something that made a better attempt to be accurate, since it is usually more interesting than old and tired anti-war sentiments.

If you recall the television series, “MASH”, you may try to remember if they ever had a line officer other than being an idiot. Were there any good Infantry troops, or were they all helpless victims?

Steven Ambrose quoted Joseph Heller about Catch 22.

Seems Heller never had a bad officer in his service in the war. He had to make them up for his story which, unfortunately, seemed to take the place of reality for a couple of generations of unwary readers.

I think you made the key point yourself when you characterized Capra as propaganda. The question is whether Bochco’s use of cliched genre conventions is also designed to facilitate a propaganda objective.

There is more elaboration of my disagreement with you at Instapunk.com.

Best wishes

So we’re wrong that the characters aren’t cartoonish or stereotypical? You pretty much prove that we’re right. Did you just write that to get a rise out of us?

Weak.

You’re wrong that it’s so terrible. As I said, it could have been much, much worse. It wasn’t particularly anti-war, it was what it was.

Jury’s still out one whether the characters are cartoonish, Bocho is famous for starting with the stereotypes and layering depth on them as the series progresses. What exactly did you expect to learn about 8 characters in 40 minutes?

Band Of Brothers setting the standard?

I’d have to say that, while it was a movie and not a TV show, “Blackhawk Down” would set a better standard. The author made sure to use at least three corroborating viewpoints (sometimes using video footage from above) before including an incident in the story. After reading the book, the film seemed spot on.

No “shaky cams” or dramatizations. No cartoon characters. No dopey love triangles (Pearl Harbor. Great scenes of attack, though).

TV shows are going to be pitched toward an audience as much as, if not more than, made as stories to be told. That’s where your accuracy is going to slide.

Just a thought on the genre argument: My favorite show used to be Law & Order (it has fallen off lately). But what made it so good was the way that the main characters would often disagree about the main legal issue of an episode - like views of capital punishment or even abortion. The writers would use this to reflect the same divisions that exist in society as a whole.

This is NOT easy to do. You have to be very honest and it must have been very difficult for L&O to keep it up as long as they did - cuz they sure are not now.

I disagree that you can not compare different genres - they may have serious differences, but comparisons of unlike things are not always useless. There are people in this country who are opposed to war - all war, always. Sometimes, I think they are kinda cute in their child-like innocence; other times they really piss me off. But they are there, and to ignore their existence in the making of any picture like this would be untrue, right?

What about the new benchmarks for the war genre? Saving Private Ryan - would Hanks’ speech about doing what he is told if it gets him home have been in an earlier (1950-60’s) war movie? I think no. But it rang true to me. And Band of Brothers - …so many things, what about the guy who won’t fight because he is so scared, or the dork officer, which was cleverly played by real-life dork Schwimmer.

It seems the war genre has changed subtly over the years from propaganda (at times for and at others against) into a more honest reflection. I still love the old propaganda films (The Longest Day) but I like the new form too.

I actually own the five VHS set of Capra’s “Why We Fight” and like watching an old TV ad or newsreel. I picked it up thinking that it was a history series, and as I was watching it, it was clear that it was propoganda. For good reasons, but still propoganda, and it was hard to extract the history from it at times.

If a Capra were to make a film series in the present to explain to our troops why they’re in the Middle East(if it hasn’t already been done), I wonder how it would look and sound. Are we more sophisticated now? And if we are, is that why we demand more of our war flicks?

Any show is only as good as its writers, director, and actors anyway.

The term “Propoganda”, as I recall, did not originally have a pejorative sense to it, ala “Ah, that’s just a bunch of propoganda” meaning “Ah, that’s just a bunch of lies and half-truths.”

One definition is:

Propaganda is a specific type of message presentation aimed at serving an agenda. At its root, the denotation of propaganda is ‘to propagate (actively spread) a philosophy or point of view’. The most common use of the term (historically) is in political contexts; in particular to refer to certain efforts sponsored by governments or political groups.

The Propogandic purpose behind “Why We Fight” was to attempt to help soldiers and citizens understand why the US was sending millions of men overseas, hundreds of thousands of which would soon be KIA or wounded. As we know from history, Nazi Germany and Militaristic Japan were both well worth fighting against. The reasons for fighting them were certainly true. I’ll grant that in the course of creating “Why We Fight”, Capra wound up making Chiang KaiShek and the Russians look a lot more palatable than they in fact were, however, at heart, “Why We Fight” presented very sound reasons for fighting the war.

Not the right place for this conversation on WWF to continue, so I’ll stop posting.

I’m just saying that it was a tad overblown at times from a modern viewer’s perspective. I certainly wouldn’t argue against its purpose or tone. It did what it set out to do, and did it well. The Japanese, for instance, came off looking like evil little hamsters with helmets in the film. Uh, which might actually be pretty accurate for the time.

So, I was coming in from a stictly cinematic angle.

And yes, there was some explaining to do to a public that was still puzzling over why Roosevelt, who had campaigned on a peace platform of sorts, was mobilizing in a huge way, and asking so much of the American people, which they gladly gave for the most part.

…I’m sure O’Bastard doesn’t mind getting tons of posts. If we keep this up, he’ll run and bust out the pretzels and beer!

Dean, I agree, WWF may be many things, but “subtle” isn’t one of them. Leni Riefenstahl was arguably the better “art” filmmaker, but Capra had the heart.

Just had a strange thought. Imagine “Leni Reifenstahl’s “It’s a Wonderful Life”. Egad.

Steven Bocho is the most overhyped writer/ producer around. If you look at his work from and including Hill Street Blues to the present all the characters are stereotypes and cliches. He’s just slick at pandering to whatever is in style. Scratch the surface and you will see how incredibly shallow and trite his highly touted stuff is. His work is regarded as ground breaking, yet the characters, ideas, plots and content in his tv shows have been around in books and films for at least two generations, and the crtics all seem to think that he’s the greatest thing since William Shakespeare with the latter a distant second. And frankly considering how terrible most TV has been in the last 25 years even if his stuff is ground breaking in television it’s backhanded compliment. Maybe he should make a TV show about singing wrestlers, that’s about his speed.