MagneticMediaFed

Almost Famous

With the exception of Venture Brothers there hasn’t been a single thing on television this summer worth mentioning — until, that is, now. Generation Kill, the new miniseries by David Simon and Ed Burns (of The Wire) has yet to show us much of anything we haven’t already seen in the likes of Jarhead (young kids with itchy trigger fingers unable to act), Three Kings (military-civilian relations) or even The Wire (chain-of-command nonsense and the failure of institutions) but we’ve really only scratched the surface of the program’s seven-plus hours. It doesn’t hurt that proceedings are nevertheless incredibly watchable and (dare I say it) actually kind of fun (racism, sexism, and homophobia aside) — though knowing Simon and Burns oeuvre I’m sure they’re setting me up for devastation.

Plus, it looks great as this is the first time their canvas is in high-definition.

It’s a bit early to get too emotionally involved. One of the problems with movies or series like this is that when all of your characters are more or less wearing the exact same thing (and when that thing happens to be several pounds of camo and armor) it can be difficult to grab a hold of individual personalities. Perhaps that is why most of the cast is packed with That One Guys and The Dude From The Things.

Until Mad Men gets underway at the end of the month, Generation Kill is the only show on television that actually feels important.

Tags: Generation Kill, HBO

This entry was posted on Monday, July 14th, 2008 at 11:09 pm and is filed under Reviews, TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.