Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Catch-22’ On Hulu, George Clooney’s New Take On The Classic Novel About Military Bureaucracy

George Clooney has used his superstar status over the last quarter century to take chances and do passion projects. Not many people would do a live version of Fail Safe or direct a film about the fabulist rantings of Chuck Barris. Most of the time, he’s hit the mark. With his frequent collaborator, Grant Heslov, he is directing and producing a new take on Joseph Heller’s classic novel Catch-22. Was this a good risk to take?

CATCH-22: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: We see an extreme closeup of a man with his face covered in blood, slowly walking through a scene that sounds chaotic. Then we see from the back that he is naked, walking through an airfield while an operation is going on. Then he screams.

The Gist: We flash back to the Santa Ana Army Air Base, where a group of airmen are going through flight training school. They’re being upbraided by their CO, Major Scheisskopf (George Clooney) about their crummy formation skills nine days before the base’s big parade. A soldier named John Yossarian (Christopher Abbott) — nicknamed Yo-Yo — mutters under his breath that, no matter what they do, they’ll still be wrong.

Clevinger (Pico Alexander), the know-it-all soldier next to him, thinks he knows what the major can do to train, and speaks up. Scheisskopf punishes Clevinger and Yo-Yo when Yo-Yo tries to stop his buddy from talking. When the parade comes, Clevinger passes out, and the two of them are punished again. “They hate you before you got here, they hate you here, and they’re going to keep on hating you after you leave,” he tells Clevinger.

Two months later, Yossarian is the lead bomber on a mission in Italy. It’s around the end of the war, but the Army Air Forces continue to go on bombing missions, taking heavy fire every time out. These bombing missions rattle Yossarian’s nerves, not just because the rest of the bombers depend on him to give the “bombs away” signal, and not just because he has no idea who he’s killing down below. He’s convinced that every time out that he’s going to be shot out of the sky. When he comes back from a mission, he vows that he will figure out a way to get out of the nine missions he needs to do to get to the 25-mission quota and get discharged.

He tries to fake liver pain in order to wait out the European theater. But Doc Daneeka (Grant Heslov), who told him back in the states to fake a liver problem, tells him to just do the missions now because he’ll end up getting malaria in the Pacific if he waits. However, nothing can prepare Yossarian for what happens during the next mission, when the bomber next to him gets blown up. Right after that, as Yossarian’s nerves are even more frayed, a new commander named Colonel Cathcart (Kyle Chandler) takes over and ups the mission quota to 30.

When Yossarian tries to get the doc to get himself grounded due to being “crazy,” the doc tells him about the catch-22: If you ask to be grounded, you’re not crazy, because it makes sense that you don’t want to keep killing people. And if you’re crazy, he can only ground you if you ask to be grounded. But if you ask to be grounded, then you’re obviously not crazy.

Our Take: Clooney and Heslov are the producers of this miniseries version of Joseph Heller’s classic novel about military bureaucracy and incompetence during World War II; Heslov directs the first episode, and he splits directing duties for the six episodes with Clooney and Ellen Kuras. Clearly, the project is one that Clooney and Heslov wanted to get off the ground. Catch-22 isn’t an easy book to put on screen, though, mainly because Heller conveyed the craziness of being in the military that goes along with the horror.

Heller does it via a lot of farcical situations, including characters like Major Major (Lewis Pullman), and airman whose parents named him Major because his bleary-eyed dad wrote his last name as his first name on the birth certificate. But in a screenplay (written by Luke Davies and David Michôd), that farcical stuff is tough to pull off. Without a deft writing and directing touch, it looks silly or heavy-handed. And that’s what we noticed here. Yossarian tells his raw new tentmate to go to the wrong tent, the kid gets mistaken for a side gunner, and gets killed on a mission before he gets to unpack his kit? Ha Ha, that’s so funny… um, no.

Even the best shows that try to contrast the horrors of war with the absurdity of the military — even M*A*S*H — don’t always get the tonal balance right. And it felt like the satire in the first episode was more manic silliness and less trenchant and funny commentary.

Sex and Skin: Yossarian has sex with Marion Scheisskopf (Julie Ann Emery) — yes, his CO’s wife — and he tells her that the only reason he joined the Army Air Forces is that it has the longest training period. He figured the war would be over once he was done training. Guess that didn’t work out well.

Parting Shot: On the mission after Cathcart takes over, Yossarian reaches out his window and tries to rub the streak of dried blood that was put there from the previous mission.

Sleeper Star: Daniel David Stewart plays Milo, who has taken the war as his chance to make a different kind of killing. His scheming skills are at play when he tries to convince his highbrow commander, Major de Coverley (Hugh Laurie) to put him in charge of the mess hall by bringing in pork chops and rare cheese.

Most Pilot-y Line: We love George Clooney and think he’s one of our best actors. But Clooney as the hard-nosed Scheisskopf? We don’t know about that. We have to see more of it to see if he can pull it off. It didn’t play well in the farcical scene where he dresses down Yossarian and Clevinger for disrupting his parade.

Our Call: STREAM IT, but Catch-22 is a show you might bail on halfway through when you realize that it replaces characterization with mistimed silliness.

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.