KATHERINE SAYS ‘I DO’ IN TLC’s DC Cupcakes: MY SWEET WEDDING –One-hour Television Event Premieres November 11 at 10 PM ET/PT Following a Special DC Cupcakes Appearance on Say Yes to the Dress––Sophie & Katherine’s New Memoir “The Cupcake Diaries: Recipes and Memories 
from the Sisters of Georgetown Cupcake” Launches November 8–

October 25, 2011

In the first 60 seconds of Bomb Patrol: Afghanistan, you will be hooked. You’ll then spend the rest of episode one with an elevated heart rate and your mouth open. It’s simply the most compelling thing you’ll see on TV.

The documentary series, which premieres tonight, follows an elite eight-man U.S. Navy Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit on their five-month deployment in Afghanistan. Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) account for more casualties among military troops in Afghanistan than anything else. These are the guys that go in to hostile territory and try to defuse them. It’s easily one of the world’s most dangerous jobs.

In the exclusive clip you see above, the team’s youngest member, Chase, is on his first mission, and he has just accidentally blown up one of their highly sophisticated robots, the Talon. He was piloting it around the site of a suspected IED, got too close, and ka-boom. Not a good first day. They sent out their other Talon to investigate—because where there’s one IED, there’s often a second—but radio interference from the first Talon stopped the second one in the tracks. Chase must now pilot a third, smaller robot-which uses a freakin’ XBOX controller-to cut the first Talon’s power supply. If he can’t, then the second Talon remains stranded, and the Chief has to go in on foot. That’s as dangerous as it sounds. (And yes, those are Contour cameras strapped to everybody’s heads.)

The 10-episode series premieres tonight at 10pm PST/EST on the G4 network. It’s rare that a TV show grabs me. I loathe reality TV, I like only a couple sit coms, and I find most documentary shows boring and/or cheesy. Bomb Patrol: Afghanistan is one of the most gripping and compelling things I’ve ever seen. Enjoy, and good luck getting to bed afterwards.

 

 

‘Bomb Patrol: Afghanistan’ is for real

 

October 24, 2011 by DIANE WERTS. Special to Newsday

 

But then “Bomb Patrol” jumps back five months, sending us off on deployment with the eight men of Navy Explosive Ordnance Disposal Platoon 342. The pace chills enough to let us get to know the guys — from a vigilant chief who has survived five combat gigs to a cocky new bomb tech who “thought it’d be fun to play with explosives and blow stuff up.”  We’re right there with them inside the cramped tank-like JERRV (Joint EOD Rapid Response Vehicle), creeping across narrow Afghan bridges, fording washed-out roads, checking containers for booby traps and generally hoping we don’t “go boom.”

MY SAY Gamers do get their day here, as the new kid uses a video game controller to send out a small robot to save two larger ones he’s already marooned in a sticky situation. Seeing it unfold via split-screen computer monitor is cool.  But very, very real. As our newbie learns, these “games” have serious stakes. And “Bomb Patrol” turns out to be an intensely human documentary. It’s economically edited and well explained (Josh Duhamel is the narrator) by producers who know how to grab your guts and not let go.

BOTTOM LINE Explosions, yes. But emotions, too.
GRADE A

Hollywood has brought the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq home for American filmgoers in sometimes stunning, painful detail in recent years. “Lions for Lambs” featured stars like Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep. “The Hurt Locker” won the Oscar for best picture. “Restrepo”
and other documentaries wowed reviewers.

On television, however, the war zones have not been nearly as visible. Though personal war stories are told on dramas like “Brothers & Sisters,” on ABC, and “Homeland,” the new Showtime series, rarely are scenes set on battlefields or military bases. Ten years into Afghanistan, there has been no “M*A*S*H,” which was set in Korea and tapped into antiwar sentiment about Vietnam in the 1970s.

But smaller-scale attempts have taken viewers to the conflicts in entertaining ways. Over the summer ABC screened a Canadian drama, “Combat Hospital,” that was set in Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan. On Tuesday the G4 cable channel will introduce “Bomb Patrol: Afghanistan,” a 10-part documentary series about a United States Navy platoon that disarms improvised explosive devices in the northern part of the country, using state-of-the-art robots, Xbox controllers and intuition.

“It’s a war that no one wants to talk about,” said Dan Cesareo, an executive producer at Big Fish Entertainment, which produced “Bomb Patrol.” The series, he said, “was an opportunity to provide a window into a world that no one has actually seen.”

Neal Tiles, the president of G4, said one of the motivations in making the show was “to keep the war in Afghanistan, 10 years later, front and center in the minds of American viewers.”

Whether viewers want to watch war stories remains an open question. Steven Bochco’s “Over There,” about members of an Army unit in Iraq and their families at home, had an average of 2.1 million viewers in 2005, prompting FX to cancel it after one season.

“Combat Hospital,” about doctors and nurses treating soldiers at an airfield hospital, had about 4.8 million viewers for its 12 weeks last summer, not nearly enough to secure a second season. An ABC spokeswoman said Monday that the show had not been renewed.

“Combat Hospital” was relatively cheap for ABC, because it was originally commissioned by the Canadian network Canwest and filmed in Ontario. Because it is unscripted, “Bomb Patrol” on G4 required five months of filming in Afghanistan by a seven-person crew.

Big Fish also had to gain access to a Navy E.O.D., or explosive ordinance disposal, unit. The process took the better part of a year and put a severe strain on Big Fish, which financed the development of the series itself. “We were spending every penny we had to keep it alive and keep it moving,” Mr. Cesareo said in an interview last week.

Once the military granted access — Rear Adm. Frank A. Morneau, deputy director of expeditionary warfare for the Navy, said he thought the series would give “insight into the human element of combat” — the producers decided to embed with an eight-person platoon that was split between two forward operating bases in northern Afghanistan. Mr. Tiles said the production crew wasn’t concerned about getting in the way. “We knew that the armed forces wouldn’t allow that,” he said.

The best-known shows on the relatively unknown G4 channel are about games and technology, so the series highlights the technological proficiency of the platoon, as well as the personalities of its members. Cameras were mounted on their helmets and chests, giving some scenes the same point of view as a video game.

The actor Josh Duhamel recently signed on to narrate the series, which will be shown on Tuesday nights at 10, Eastern time. Mr. Cesareo bristled at the term “reality show” for the series, instead calling it a documentary.

Diane Gordon, who publishes the television industry newsletter The Surf Report, said the best television representations of the wars have come from documentaries like “Restrepo,” which was shown on the National Geographic Channel after a theatrical release, and the “Frontline” films on PBS. Some editions of the Fox News weekend series “War Stories” have also recounted missions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Scripted mini-series, too, have taken on the impact of the wars; in 2008 HBO was praised for the mini-series “Generation Kill,” based on an embedded reporter’s experience in Iraq. But for the most part, “I think network executives think war zones are too rough and real for American viewers to watch week to week,” Ms. Gordon said. “Americans are used to stylized violence,” not war violence, she added, citing “ ‘CSI’ dead bodies, car chases with gunplay, vampires killing people, and now zombies slowly chasing their prey in a never-ending pursuit.”

A zombie attack, it’s fair to say, is less likely to affect a family than a military deployment.

Mr. Tiles of G4 compared “Bomb Patrol” to the embedded journalism that was prevalent in the opening stages of the Iraq war in 2003. Asked whether the series was primarily news or entertainment, he answered, “You tell me what the difference is,” and suggested that it was a bit of both. Most important, he said, “We’re not telling people to go disarm that bomb again for dramatic effect.”