But the series, which premieres tonight at 10, is a surprisingly conventional war story in praise of Americans fighting on foreign soil, broken but unbowed. The title of the show, which reaches back to World War I and the Yankee Doodle innocence of George M. Cohan, carries little irony here. Despite its edgy stylings, ''Over There" is a straight, well-made homage to our boys and girls in Iraq -- the duty-bound young mother, for instance, and the newly injured hero longing to return to his post. It portrays very few of this particular war's moral and political twists, even while it strongly captures a general sense of band-of-brothers bravery and battle suspense.
And that's too bad. ''Over There" is the only TV series about an American war to air during that war. As such, it's a missed opportunity to dislodge some of the issues about this fight while they're still incendiary. It doesn't need to be a political screed on one side or the other to fold in psychic elements specific to this conflict.
Our presence in Iraq has divided this country, but you'd never know that watching ''Over There." None of the soldiers or their family members back home take even a subtextual stance on the war. Do these kids know why they're fighting in Iraq? Do they care? Do they assume most Iraqis are glad we're over there? The show is rigidly neutral, just as producer Steven Bochco promised it would be when he vowed to be ''completely apolitical" in his advance press.
That journalistic neutrality weakens its dramatic potential, as if Bochco and his writers are too concerned about alienating opinionated viewers to really make us think. After all, politics are part of the daily lives of the soldiers of ''Over There," whether they know it or not. A show about them can only benefit from that timely sense of context. Two other FX series, ''Nip/Tuck" and ''Rescue Me," are extraordinary precisely because they are so willing to dive into the cultural complications of their particular realms -- youth-obsession and post-9/11 trauma, respectively. They go to the heart of controversies without sacrificing drama. ''Over There" isn't escapism by any means, with its tense eruptions of physical and emotional violence, but it's thematically evasive.
