There are a couple military comedies out there – MAS*H, F-Troop, McHale’s Navy, Gomer Pyle, etc. But have there been any successful military-set dramas? (I’ll use “drama” in an all-encompasing sense here of anything non-comedic: suspense, action, straight-up drama, whatever.) I can’t think of any, and I wonder why not. We’ve had cop dramas, lawyer dramas, FBI dramas, doctor dramas; why not the military?
NCIS, Emerald Point, NAS, The Unit, China Beach…
There was NBC’s spectacularly bad E-Ring which lasted a dozen episodes or so last year.
Baa Baa Blacksheep or possibly Black Sheep Squadron—something like that, starring Robert Conrad as Major Pappy Boyington, WWII Marine fighter pilot.
The Rat Patrol–special forces sorta deal set in North Africa during WWII
Oh, and JAG.
But I suppose JAG and NCIS are really just lawyer and cop shows with a military setting.
Can’t forget JAG…
also that military lawyer show…think it was called JAG
The latter-day version of Battlestar Galactica.
Combat!
Huh. Maybe I’m just out of the loop, because the only one of these I’ve even heard of is JAG, and I thought of it as more of a lawyer show. Were any of these other shows big hits?
The Unit is pretty recent (began last season, I think)
China Beach and Emerald Point, NAS were 80s shows. Emerald Point ran from 1983 to 1984 and China Beach ran from 1988 to 1991. Admittedly 1 season may not be able to be said to be “successful” but 3 seasons is pretty good.
NCIS has also run for 3 years so far, beginning in 2003.
Neither show had a long original run, and they aren’t something you see being rerun on cable all that often.
Combat! ran five seasons.
Twelve O’Clock High ran three, but was a success until Robert Lansing left as the lead.
There was also Tour of Duty, which lasted three seasons.
I seem to recall a show that was on in the 60’s. Very gritty and realistic. It ran at 6pm in most TV markets. I think it was called Diet Spam, Veet Pam…something like that. Seems like it ran forever.
Wasn’t “Band of Brothers” a military series?
Never seen it but have seen the blurbs and it sure looked like it.
JAG was more of an action adventure/mystery drama that regularly involved lawyers and courtrooms. It would vary from episode to episode or season to season. One episode might be a straight-up courtroom drama, another might involve one or two of the characters traveling to some faraway place on a seperate character plot (a number of notable episodes involved Harm traveling to Russia in search of his father, a pilot shot down and MIA in Vietnam, and the 7th season featured many of the characters deployed out to sea or to Afghanistan during the fight against Al Queda and the Taliban in that country).
NCIS is a spinoff of JAG; the first episode featured the investigation of the death of one of the less likeable characters of JAG, with Commander Rabb (main character of JAG) as the primary suspect.
Don’t know if Stargate SG1 and Stargate Atlantis count as military dramas, given their heavy sci-fi leanings, though they do notably involve the modern-day militaries of the US and its allies doing lots of very very secret stuff in two or three different galaxies.
Space Above and Beyond is another military drama that I liked (they were space fighter pilots in an interstellar war, but that was pretty much just window dressing for the plots, which could have taken place pretty much in any time frame.)
Well, sorta. It was produced by HBO, and was more like an extended mini series tracing the exploits of Easy Company of the 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne Division from training through the end of the war. Great show, well worth watching. Not sure it should be considered in the same light as the other shows though–it was intended to cover a set time period, in a set number of episodes.
What was the one with James Brolin? I think it ran a season or two.
Garrison’s Gorillas ran a season or two in the mid-late 60s.
Sir Rhosis