ABSTRACT
Hollywood executive producer Steven Bochco has done it again. The creator of many pop culturally hip, often violent, and generally profanity-laced American television cop shows like Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law, or more recently NYPD Blue has now turned to the war in Iraq. But the audience-grabbing recipe of the previous cop shows is still the same: to depict in as realistic a way as possible the mundane experiences, interrupted by bouts of extreme tension, brutality, and crisis, of the true heroes out there (whether the heroes are cops on New York city’s streets or army privates in the Middle East is just a matter of fate, or bad luck perhaps). Bochco’s most recent production, Over There, a show about the daily tasks and often ordeals of a US Army unit in Iraq, is eye-catching, traumatizing, perhaps awe-inspiring, and typically exciting to watch. It is drama at its best, or as
Bochco boasts: “Without dramatizing the consequences of terrible, violent events, you aren’t doing your job.”4 But like Bochco’s cop shows before, Over There is also a matter-of-factly presented story, with an emphasis placed on daily routines, small details in the everyday life of the soldiers in the midst of war. In a sense, Over There can be understood to be displaying a form of tabloid story-telling and tabloid spectacle not unlike those produced by many geopolitical discourses and representations found in the US media (broadly defined) before and after 9/11. Indeed, on the show Over There, the dialogues are often banal and non-heroic, and sometimes have very little to do with the war itself. Exchanges between privates over what they did in high school, why they did not go to college, what position they played on the football team, how they got their nicknames, or what their favorite beer is add nothing to the plot of the episodes. Yet these exchanges are crucial to the story and the visuals as Bochco has designed them. They enlist on the part of the audience members a sense of trust, offer them a guarantee that they can feel and understand exactly what these guys on screen are going through. These dialogues make sure that the spectators are indeed experiencing not just yet another Hollywood blockbuster-type fiction, with explosions, fire, and blood everywhere, but rather an existential drama about the “military grunts” out there in Iraq who could easily be any one of them.5
