Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
If you didn’t get enough of the red, white and blue watching The Brave on Monday night, CBS presents SEAL Team, which follows a Navy SEAL team as it kills bad guys overseas and manages their lives back home. Read on to find out why, if you want to watch a military drama this season, this is the one to watch.
A Guide to Our Rating System
Opening Shot: The opening of a pilot can set a mood for the entire show (think Six Feet Under); thus, we examine the first shot of each pilot.
The Gist: The “who, what, where, when, why?” of the pilot.
Our Take: What did we think? Are we desperate for more or desperate to get that hour back?
Sex and Skin: That’s all you care about anyway, right? We let you know how quickly the show gets down and dirty.
Parting Shot: Where does the pilot leave us? Hanging off a cliff, or running for the hills?
Sleeper Star: Basically, someone in the SEAL Team cast who is not the top-billed star who shows great promise.
Most Pilot-y Line: Pilots have a lot of work to do: world building, character establishing, and stakes raising. Sometimes that results in some pretty clunky dialogue.
Our Call: We’ll let you know if you should, ahem, Stream It or Skip It.
SEAL TEAM
Opening Shot: Jason Hayes (David Boreanaz), the leader of a SEAL Tier One team, wiping blood onto his pants, with a look of shock on his face, during an operation. We cut immediately to Hayes, in what looks like a therapist office, with a bemused look on his face while the therapist asks him, “Do you know why you’re here?”
The Gist: If you read our Stream It Or Skip It for The Brave, then you basically have the plot of this pilot. They’re virtually identical, at least when it comes to the mission the teams go on: retrieve an American woman held captive in an overseas hotspot (this time, it’s Liberia), while at the same time find and capture the bigwig terrorist who the unit has been looking for for years.
This time around, though, we at least get a look into some of the team’s lives: Hayes is in government-mandated therapy because he blames himself for losing one of his men during a mission where he pushed the objective beyond his orders. He denies he’s traumatized, but he also still rubs his hand on his pants, as if he’s still got his buddy’s blood on his hands. We also find out that his marriage is kaput, and he never seems to be around for his daughter.
We also see a little bit of the backstory of Hayes’ right-hand man on the team, Ray Perry (Neil Brown Jr.), who has a pregnant wife at home. Also, the SEALs’ support team, known as “straphangers” or “straps” in the lingo, travel with them to each mission. Included in that group is Clay Spenser (Max Thieriot), a translator fresh out of SEAL training who is the son of a former SEAL who wrote a tell-all book, and CIA agent Mandy Ellis (Jessica Paré), who has been chasing the terrorist in the pilot for years.
Our Take: If you think we’re going to criticize SEAL Team for having the same pilot plot as The Brave, you’d be wrong. SEAL Team is an example that in a lot of ways, it’s not about the story but in how it’s executed. Everything about this show is superior to The Brave, from the acting, to the writing to the cinematography.
We felt a lot of tension while the team was executing the mission, and things didn’t happen nearly as cleanly as they did on The Brave. Yes, they rescued the hostage and got their HVT (High Value Target), but Hayes didn’t like the fact that the “strap,” Spenser, shot the terrorist when they could have taken him alive. But his buddy Ray couldn’t say for sure if that was the right move or not. Abiguity like this is refreshing, because that’s what happens in battle.
This feels more like a cable prestige show than a bland military procedural, and that’s because showrunner Ed Redlich and his writing team gave some of the players just enough backstory to make us intrigued. We know that, while they can manage things when danger is all around them and plans change in a heartbeat, they can’t figure out how to make their families a priority. We know Hayes has had problems shaking the loss of his buddy. We even buy Paré, last seen on Mad Men, being a hardened agent who just can’t abide seeing an HVT slide away to kill more civilians and children. It’s enough to tell us that there will be moral difficulties, and things going wrong, and the show won’t be just about killing Muslim bad guys (though that will be a big part of it, unfortunately).
Sex and Skin: It’s all business in the pilot.
Parting Shot: Unlike The Brave, which ended on a bogus cliffhanger, SEAL Team ends with Hayes making his daughter’s recital while it’s in progress, happy to be there, but still rubbing his hand on his thigh, showing that his trauma will be dogging him for a long time to come.
Sleeper Star: Paré is definitely a pleasant surprise. We also thought Thieroit did a nice job as the young “strap,” Spenser.
Most Pilot-y Line: The writers went a little too heavy on the jargon and acronyms, making some scenes hard to follow.
Our Call: Stream It. SEAL Team, so far, doesn’t look like just an exercise in jingoism; it has the potential to really dive into the lives of people who carry on extremely sensitive and dangerous missions, and the agents and military personnel who support them, but can’t talk about what they’ve seen and experienced to anyone but each other because it’s all classified. The moral dilemmas, hidden and not-so-hidden traumas, and troubled personal lives can make for a surprisingly deep show, especially for CBS. For all we know, this will become as “rescue of the week” as The Brave seems to be. But until, then, we’re going to keep watching SEAL Team.
(Click to see all of Decider’s complete Stream It or Skip It reviews)
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.
