Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Valor’, The CW’s Patriotic Drama Where Pretty People Kill Bad Guys (Maybe?)

If you ever wondered what a CW version of a military show would look like, then tune in to Valor. It’s got everything you may want in a CW military show: pretty people having sex, military equipment and jargon, and a big fat mystery that unfolds over the course of a season. Is it worth staying with it, though?

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 Valor 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.

VALOR

Opening Shot: A dark landscape, where we see two Black Hawk heilcopters shoot into view. The location is “Golis Mountains, Somalia,” and “Walk Idiot Walk” from The Hives starts playing in the background.

The Gist: This turns out to be a flashback to a special ops mission a unit of the Army’s best helicopter pilots, the Shadow Raiders, was executing. After an ambush by forces on the ground, an RPG forces the pilots, Warrant Officer Nora Madani (Christina Ochoa) and Captain Leland Gallo (Matt Barr) have to ditch. Their gunner, Jimmy Kam (W. Trè Davis), is unaccounted for.

Back home, Nora is having trouble getting back to duty after the injury she incurred, mainly because she keeps flashing back to that night. Her boyfriend, intelligence specialist Lt. Ian Porter (Charlie Barnett), knows she’s hiding something but she says she’s ready to fly again. But she is hiding something: she and Leland conspired to falsify their reports because the hostage that was picked up that night wasn’t a foreign operator, but a U.S. Army soldier. As the co-pilots try to unravel the mystery (which gets worse because Nora killed another officer that was after the prisoner), the pressure to crack increases, especially after a CIA agent named Thea (Melissa Roxburgh) is assigned to investigate.

Our Take: Unlike SEAL Team and The Brave, Valor isn’t a kill-some-bad-guys-every-week sort of show; it’s more of a CW-style mystery that just happens to take place in a special ops unit. By itself, that could be intriguing, but if you lost the military element and just set this in, say, a big corporation, the show would be essentially the same. And that’s not a good thing.

In the span of the pilot, we have one sex scene, Nora scrunching her face into a semi-grimace about 3 dozen times, Nora and her co-pilot (and CO) flying over an abandoned apartment complex, then later almost having sex inside said complex, The flirting with Lt. Porter, a bunch of flashbacks, Kamm’s attempt to escape captivity, and a final flashback to that night and what happened.

Whew, that’s a lot, and in between those scenes, enough bad dialogue and yelly acting is squeezed in to fill three pilots. The characters seem cobbled together from other military shows: the smirky renegade pilot who has “seen it all” and has the scars to match; the eager young female soldier who has had to “work twice as hard” to make it because of her gender (the exact line was in The Brave); the sympathetic boyfriend who’s being frozen out; the gruff liutenant colonel who gives her the benefit of the doubt; the suspicious federal agent; etc. etc. None of these roles are well-played to the point where we want to see any of them again. The best part about them is that they’re all good looking.

Sex and Skin: Four minutes in, we see Leland having sex with some rando (she works in the base’s archives, it turns out), who has kinkily handcuffed him to the bedpost. Then we have to remind ourselves what network this show on, and it makes more sense.

Parting Shot: After shooting the officer chasing the soldier-prisoner back in Somalia, a teeth-gritting Nora tells Leland: “He’s dead!”

Sleeper Star: We can’t think of any. The performances all felt over the top.

Most Pilot-y Line: So many to choose from! We’ll go with the line Nora whispers in Leland’s ear after they have a heavy make-out in his hideout but she breaks it off knowing it can get them court-martialed: “Duty is the cure for weakness… sir.”

Our Call: SKIP IT. This isn’t as bad as The Brave, but it makes SEAL Team look like Platoon by comparison. The mystery isn’t compelling enough for us to follow, and the sexcapades just feel like window dressing.

(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.