Of the three military dramas premiering this fall, two made their debuts this week on NBC and CBS: The Brave and SEAL Team, respectively. One is definitely more worth the investment than the other.
Where NBC's drama tries to be an adventurous blend of American Sniper, Homeland, and 24, it actually plays like NCIS: Middle East. There's none of the heart of the Bradley Cooper-led film, none of the intelligence of Homeland, and none of the urgency of 24. The Brave is a bland, choppy procedural and nothing more.
For starters, there appear to be more characters on this show than can fit into a single tweet. My head was spinning (and then aching) as on-screen text announced each individual in the pilot's establishing scenes. There are officers and analysts with the Defense Intelligence Agency, led by Anne Heche's Patricia Campbell; there are field operatives, including a former SEAL, a medic, a sniper, and a communications director; plus a kidnapped ophthalmologist the team is trying to recover, her captors, and her patients, all of whom play some role in the pilot's convoluted and interminable story. With over a dozen different moving parts, it's hard to keep track of and care about the people build into this recovery mission/terrorist elimination plot.
The way creator Dean Georgaris (whose resume is a bumblefuck of similarly awful films, beginning with the shitty Tomb Raider sequel in 2003) attempts to inject characterization and tension into his script is through unbearably stilted, awkward dialogue such as, "Kimberly Wells' lifespan just shrunk from weeks to days." There's also an uncomfortable feeling of nationalism running through the pilot, beginning almost immediately with our introduction to Jaz (Natacha Karam), the sniper. "Preach," the former SEAL (Demetrius Grosse), asks her, "Were you raised Muslim, Jaz?" She replies seriously, "I was raised a New Yorker." There are twinges of Islamophobia here (Muslim, New York, twenty-or-thirty-something woman: you do the math) and some strange patriotism that I don't really understand, like country before faith or something. That kind of rah-rah 'Merica feeling is threaded throughout the first hour, making everything feel really cheesy. (It doesn't help that the team struts into their mission to the soundtrack of a Fall Out Boy song from a Disney movie.)
The bottom line is that The Brave is anything but. It's safe. It's yet another show where half the action takes place in control rooms on computer screens, and the other half scrambles through predictable scenarios in dark alleys.
SEAL Team (Wednesdays at 9:00 on CBS)
SEAL Team is everything The Brave is not. It has the emotion and tension the NBC drama lacks, and that success can be attributed largely to the script by Benajamin Cavell (who actually has TV experience, having written for Sneaky Pete and Justified and produced season 5 of Homeland) and the direction of Emmy nominee Christopher Chulack (ER, Longmire).
Where SEAL Team especially succeeds is in humanizing its characters. Whereas The Brave has so many people to keep track of that it feels like an insurmountable task to even learn names, SEAL Team immediately puts its focus on the emotional and psychological toll being part of an elite military unit takes on its members. We meet Jason Hayes (David Boreanaz, at the top of his game) in therapy as he is treated for PTSD following the loss of his best friend on a mission. His fellow men are seen saying goodbye to a pregnant wife; getting beaten up in training because of tainted family legacy; and shouldering the guilt of not being able to save everyone. These are people with problems, and rooting SEAL Team in the personal lives of its characters is the first really smart decision that sets the show apart from The Brave. Before we ever see them leave for a mission (which is a pretty standard terrorist raid), we care about them, or at the very least understand them.
Also making the pilot stand out is how well Chulack's direction serves the writing. His action scenes are in line with the grit and cinema verite style of Zero Dark Thirty rather than the flash-bang pyrotechnics of typical war movies, which perfectly relates back to the more intimate storytelling SEAL Team is doing. The camera is constantly moving and shaking and getting close up so we can see every facial tic. It makes Boreanaz's performance really stand out, and his assured presence and swagger smooth over some of the less effective dialogue.
There are, of course, some issues. As I already mentioned, the kidnap recovery story of the pilot is boilerplate (and very similar to that of The Brave) and some of the performances need time and space to grow, particularly Jessica Pare's Mandy, the guilt-stricken member of the team. She's just fine, but she's dwarfed by Boreanaz in their big scene together, and she doesn't feel authoritative enough for her position. But aside from that, SEAL Team is a surprisingly solid drama, certainly the better of the two military procedurals that premiered this week.
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