The rising number of wounds among the soldiers and the steady depletion of ammo gin up some urgency, but too many scenes force us to wait alongside the men for intervention without learning enough about who they are.Įach of Long Road Home’s eight episodes focuses on a different character, with extensive, Orange Is the New Black-like flashbacks fleshing out backstories.
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The multi-step rescue operation is somewhat hard to follow, robbing the series of tension it could certainly use more of. As the title implies, Long Road Home takes some time to pull the squads back in from danger. Michael Kelly and Jason Ritter give the production its obligatory boldface names, but their roles are relatively small and, in the overall scheme of things, pretty insignificant. The nervous, soul-sustaining chatter - funny, bro-y and sometimes deeply uncomfortable - makes for some of the miniseries’ best written scenes.įar less compelling is the activity back at the base. A pair of young dads (Jorge Diaz and Ian Quinlan) horse around, barely grown up themselves. The soldiers ask each other - rhetorically, then not so rhetorically - whether they could shoot a child. Another scoffs that it’s no wonder the insurgents fear death so little what would you have to live for if you lived in Sadr City? A third resents being made into a killer. One grouses about the Iraqis’ ingratitude toward the American peacekeepers. His grim austerity is contrasted by the bored flippancy with which the younger soldiers meet their tasks. Robert Miltenberger (Jeremy Sisto), a Kosovo vet haunted by war’s savagery who doesn’t let his fatalism keep him from protecting his brothers in uniform. Shane is both relatable and inspirational, a D&D fan who has to keep his smartest but most aggressive soldier (Jon Beavers) in line to ensure that there aren’t any unnecessary deaths on an already grisly and panic-stricken night. Initially saddled with a baldly manipulative prelude about leaving behind his extremely photogenic children, Bonilla proves a fantastic anchor of a sprawling tale with his level-headed, slightly dorky presence. His team holes up in an Iraqi home and is forced to take its family of four hostage. Bonilla) and the two squads he’s leading are ambushed by heavily armed rebels.
On a routine surveillance run around the city (with an automated cannon towering out of the humvee roof), Lt. But I kept finding myself more often wondering what the characters made of their mission - which was sold to them as humanitarian peacekeeping - than absorbed in the umpteenth firefight between soldiers and insurgents. The mini is a lavish production, with chases, cityscapes, tanks and explosions vying for attention. We’re all in this together.That depoliticization lands The Long Road Home somewhere between an earnest brochure and a proper drama. “I hope take away that this is a story about humans and family,” Bourquin said. This isn’t a story about one platoon, he said. “Why not turn to them again when you’re going through difficult things?” he said of his fellow soldiers who are also involved with the series. “The fact that I’m still sitting here breathing is not lost on me,” he said, adding that staying connected to his battle buddies has really helped him work through everything that happened. “I was healing by exposing myself over and over to this and just speaking about this to all the people.”īourquin said he started therapy in 2008 and has done “extensive amounts” since, but he said working on this series has been equal to those years of therapy. “The ability to be back in Iraq, back on my battlefield, without having to actually travel there and face the dangers that are present there has been fantastic,” he said.
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The set for the show was built around Fort Hood, where the soldiers trained before deploying.Ībout 80 buildings were constructed to resemble Sadr City, and Bourquin said being on the set with the cast and crew and putting them through training was a nice full circle.
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