Six

While action scenes from such military fare as “The Last Ship” come off as a bit hokey, that’s not the case with Six. The combat looks and feels real. That’s a credit to the Broyles. With TV veterans Goggins and Sloane, the acting’s on par with action.

The actors do their best to put life into these scenes, but they are so brief and expository, given how much territory there is to cover, that they feel mostly manufactured. Still, action is action--and this action is well staged--and it's reliably compelling to watch the good guys, with their night-vision goggles, special guns and ninja tread, going after the bad.

The show tries very hard to give us believable female characters in this context, but I’m afraid the best Six can do is achieve a kind of high-class soap opera. ... When the show travels outside of America, it’s still full of macho dialogue that can be wearisome--“We’re gonna fix this because that’s what we do; we’re gonna bring Rip home!”--but it has a blend of action and moral inquisitiveness that makes the show intriguing.

Six is not Band of Brothers or even Generation Kill, and it doesn’t always get the balance of its many storylines right (though I respect it trying). Still, it’s an engaging series that could continue to get better as it goes deeper with the drama and character building

If you’re doing the math at home, add shocking violence to a side of soap opera and you’re left with Six. At the end of the night, that may not be enough for you.

The show’s directors are adept at shooting action, and when the men of SEAL Team Six are on missions and in other high-risk situations, their motivations and actions are usually rendered with taut energy and fluid economy. It’s when the narrative returns to the home front, or laboriously stitches together its overarching terrorism plot, that the show feels most predictable.

The performances and the above-average directing team may lure some viewers who will then get irked by the rah-rah "America, hell yeah" bellicosity and those who come for the "America, hell yeah" bellicosity will probably get ticked off by all the pesky feelings, and by the suggestion that sometimes soldiers do bad things in war.

It’s a marginally adequate, unremarkable series that follows fictional members of Navy SEAL Team Six on fictional missions inspired by actual missions.

The series is at its convincing best when it depicts the constant and oppressive danger of covert operations, and the Broyleses have created credible characters to hold our interest. There’s something very off about the visuals of the series, though. It just doesn’t really look like a war zone. It’s too clean, for one thing, but the lighting and use of video instead of film battle the convincing elements of the series.

The action is well-captured, including a couple of beautiful shots (courtesy of Lesli Linka Glatter, who directed the first two episodes) better than the sequences themselves. But Six’s disinterest in anything fresh, from an outsider’s perspective to a stronger opinion about anything in this world, dooms the series to mediocrity.

By the end of the fourth hour, Six already feels like a feature film that’s been padded to meet an eight-episode order. It’s diverting at times, but nothing you haven’t seen before.

Six engages these tricky topics only commando-style: It hits them quickly and evacuates, focusing instead mainly on action, sentimentality and the relentless message, already plentiful in the news, that this is a sick, scary world. After 15-plus years of war-on-terror stories, it’s just one more wearying engagement.