Generation Kill, "Bomb in the Garden": Iceman vs. Captain America

Spoilers for the "Generation Kill" finale coming up just as soon as I score some valium...

When I interviewed the "Generation Kill" producers shortly before it premiered, David Simon said something interesting that didn't make it into the final story. While talking about the thematic similarities between "Generation Kill" and "The Wire" -- specifically, how both shows give their loyalties to the footsoldiers on the ground, and eye their bosses with extreme suspicion -- he said, "To be fair, it would have been a different book if (Wright) had hung with Ferrando."

"Bomb in the Garden" provides some hints of what that book might have been like. We get the throwaway moment between Sgt. Major Sixta and Gunny Wynn when Sixta offers to bring up the grooming standard as a way to combat drooping morale. (The men, of course, hated Sixta for ragging on them about their moo-stashes, but it was usually in that Charlie Finley Oakland A's way, where their mutual hatred of an authority figure brought them all together.) More importantly, we get the reporter (who is never, as far as I can tell, referred to by name at any point in the miniseries) doing his exit interview with Godfather. Ferrando suspects that Captain America is probably unfit for combat, but he has the same perspective on Cap's actions that he does on Lt. Fick's -- which is to say that he has to rely on the reports of men below him, and sometimes below those officers -- and if he deals harshly with one, isn't he obligated to deal harshly with the other? Yes, we know Fick is a great leader and Cap is a nutcase, but we're seeing them from a different point of view, and one that's then filtered through Evan Wright and again through Simon, Ed Burns and company.

By the same token, the wanderings of First Recon during their days in Baghdad seem aimless and counter-productive to Fick and Colbert, but there could have been very rational motives behind each of them from the way command saw things. The explanation behind the lack of night patrols wasn't a terrible one; in that environment, who's to say the presence of the U.S. forces at night might not have made things worse, along with getting our guys killed?

But allowing for the possibility of an alternate perspective only goes so far. There's no way to justify punishing Kocher and Redman for the bayonet incident and promptly reinstate the actual bayonet-wielder, Captain America, for instance. And we are, after all, five years removed from the events depicted here, and our military is still over there trying to clean up the mess we made by breaking the country without having a sound plan to immediately begin fixing it.

In that way, "Bomb in the Garden" is more important than all six previous "Generation Kill" chapters put together. The miniseries has been enormously entertaining (even if, as I've said, the "Groundhog Day" nature of the Marines' lives made it tough to blog at times), but in deconstructing how Operation: Iraqi Freedom went wrong, they were all just a lead up to the events depicted here. As an invasion, this was an enormous success; we took down an entire country in three weeks time. As an attempt to promote democracy and discourage terrorism, it's been a dismal failure, for reasons illustrated by First Recons various misadventures in this hour. You can't just leave the unexploded bomb in the garden, because sooner or later somebody's going to blow the thing up, right?

Some specific moments I liked in the finale:

• The Marines' arrival in the cigarette factory, with the silver paper raining down on them like a ticker-tape parade, was a perfect homage to/parody of President Bush's "Mission Accomplished." The war is allegedly over, but the battles are going to keep going for years and years.

• Much as I love the Rick Rubin-produced Johnny Cash "America" albums, they're dangerously close to becoming a cliche for TV show montages. "Sarah Connor Chronicles," of all shows, already used "The Man Comes Around" at the end of its last season, but I'll give "Generation Kill" a pass because the song is such a perfect fit, between the mix of jaunty tune and somber lyrics (a nice match for the show's black comedy and how the Marines often found their greatest joy when matters were at their worst) and the radio squelch at the beginning and end, which matched the miniseres' opening credits and constant stream of radio chatter.

• The home movie, by the way, was a mixture of footage shot by the production and stuff shot by the actual First Recon Marines during the invasion, much of it scrounged up by the real Eric Kocher.

• Kocher, Wright and others have talked about how quiet Ray Person is in the real world when he's had a lot of sleep and isn't guzzling Ripped Fuel. I liked the acknowledgement of that in the moment where Colbert complains that he isn't talking any more.

• Though the themes are very different, the structure of this episode reminded me in many ways of the finale to HBO's other great war miniseries, "Band of Brothers," which also featured odd vignettes about what the company did after the end of the war but before they got sent home. Both episodes even climax with a sporting event, albeit with divergent tones. In "Band," it's a baseball game that provides the Easy Company soldiers an opportunity to exhale and enjoy the beautiful countryside; here, it's a football game that gives the men (particularly Person and Capt. Patterson) an excuse to physically but unofficially vent their frustration with the likes of Encino Man and Fruity Rudy. (Rudy actually hadn't done much in the past to earn Ray's ire, but Ray's rant about high school jocks suggested his explosion had little to do with Rudy himself.)

• Getting back to the nature of perspective, the new edition of Wright's book (the one with the miniseries' cast on the cover) has an afterword filling in what happened to many of these Marines after the invasion. Of particular interest is the revelation that Casey Kasem turned out to be a hero during combat in a later deployment.

• The original Alan Arkin/Peter Falk version of "The In-Laws" was one of my family's favorite movies when I was growing up, and so when the reporter started zig-zagging while running away from the sniper, I immediately started shouting, "Serpentine, Shel! Serpentine!" But for the reporter to then actually quote the scene? Pure pop culture Nirvana. (I had forgotten that bit from the book, thankfully.) Can someone get that clip up on YouTube already? (The only scene I can find is this one.) I'm not sure how funny it is if you haven't watched Falk torment Arkin for the previous hour, but in context it is one of the most hilarious things ever committed to celluloid.

• Throughout, the singalongs have been a real pleasure, but I especially loved Colbert finally relaxing the ban on country music while Ray was asleep -- and that Ray was just awake enough to realize this.

• Another running gag paid off well: Trombley's "You see, Sergeant? We do shoot dogs in Iraq," followed by him defiantly eating some Charms.

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Generation Kill, "Stay Frosty": When Captain America stabs his mighty bayonet...

Brief spoilers for the penultimate episode of "Generation Kill" coming up just as soon as I guzzle a milkshake...

I'll be honest: this is another week where I feel like I'm running out of things to say. Again, I'm enjoying "Generation Kill" enormously, but as I said a few weeks back, each episode is very much of a piece, and I feel like we've hit most of the major themes by now. I imagine I'll be more inspired to write about the seventh and final episode (which I haven't watched yet), given that it covers the Marines' time in Iraq post-"Mission Accomplished," but this week I'm going to keep it brief and just highlight a few things I either liked or was interested in:

• Colbert's brief moment of Zen -- sprinting around camp doing his best impression of a bird in flight -- was beautiful, a moment of pure joy from a guy who usually carries himself like a machine. In particular, I loved how, after he said "Better now," it was like he flipped a switch and turned back into the Iceman.

• Sgt. Major Sixta returns after being absent for several episodes, and his mangled pronunciations and grammar -- "You inappropriating your chemical filtration device by attempting fornication with! Jesus, do I have to tell you not to dee-secretate your mask for perversions!" -- made me giggle like usual.

• For the most part, we've seen Godfather through Fick's eyes, and it hasn't been the most flattering view, as Fick clearly worries that Godfather is putting his men in danger solely to impress General Matis. But Ferrando's conversation with Colbert -- who, like a lot of the other men, really wants another mission and is pleased to hear he might get one -- shows us another angle on the man.

• They certainly haven't held back in showing Captain America's meltdown, have they? When I interviewed the real Kocher before the miniseries debuted, he said that people ask him all the time whether Cap was really that crazy, and he says that both the book and the miniseries leave out a whole lot of other behavior even more bizarre, possibly because no one would believe it.

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Generation Kill, "A Burning Dog": A bridge too pothole-riddled

Spoilers for the latest episode of "Generation Kill" coming up just as soon as I enter my Ferrari into a demolition derby...

"This is why we're here." -Encino Man

We're in the home stretch now, and "A Burning Dog" presents the longest, most thrilling/frightening combat sequence yet, as First Recon gets ambushed on a bridge at nightfall, saved only by the Spidey-sense of Iceman Colbert. But even though the firefight, shot predominantly from the point of view of the Marines' night vision goggles and target scopes, was impressive, what really stands out in this episode is the arc for Lt. Fick.

(And allow me to pause for a moment to warn you that this post is going to be about as political as I get on this blog. When you're discussing a docudrama about an ongoing war, one that pointedly and repeatedly criticizes the tactics and philosophies behind it, it becomes hard to discuss it without in some way agreeing or disagreeing -- and therefore attacking or defending the architects of said war.)

Early on, after he awesomely pulls rank on Casey Kasem ("And nobody f-ing spoke to you!") and accepts Encino Man's peace offering, he reluctantly turns into a spokesman for the same messed-up command hierarchy that he's been trying to protect his men from since the invasion began. Even as he's doing it, even as he's shutting down complaints from Colbert and the others, he knows he's making a tough choice, maybe the wrong choice, to honor the olive branch from a superior officer. But if he's had questions about command from the start of the invasion, he's never questioned the invasion itself... until Meesh explains about the Syrian student who entered Iraq after the invasion started with "jihad" listed on his passport as his reason for entering the country.

Encino Man is too thick-headed to understand what that means, but Fick gets it, asking Gunny Wynn, "Isn't this the exact opposite of what we wanted to have happen?"

Early in the episode, one of the Marines complains that "We keep making the same f-ing mistakes." All of them in some way stem from arrogance, from the leaders of this invasion -- whether it's someone at Encino Man's level, or Godfather's, or Rumsfeld's, or President Bush himself -- believing beyond a shadow of a doubt that they know what they're doing, and that they can impose their will on others to achieve the result they want. And just as no one put enough thought into how we would go about rebuilding Iraq after we deposed Saddam, it never occurred to anyone that, if the terrorists claimed to hate us for meddling too much in other people's affairs, then invading a sovereign nation (albeit one run by a very bad man) might actually generate more anti-US sentiments, not less.

While Fick is realizing the dangers of being a true believer going against other true believers, the episode's other major character movement contrasts how Iceman is holding up under the strains of the mission with how Hasser the turret gunner is taking things. As the man riding up top (and a mid-mission swap for Garza at that), Hasser hasn't gotten as much screen time as the other four guys in the Humvee, but all we need to know here is that he's too tired to function properly and too wired to sleep. Colbert can take a dump tactically, can get tiny amounts of sleep when the opportunity arises, and can summon enough focus in spite of the fatigue to foil the ambush before it even started. Hasser's not superhuman like that; he's all too human, a point brought painfully home when he shoots and kills the driver of a car at the roadblock without waiting for Brad's gas grenade plan to work. It's not that Hasser is necessarily wrong, but that nobody should be asked to make such a fine judgment call under these physical conditions, and yet that's what the Marines have to do all the time. Even Colbert quickly recognizes that there's no point in chewing him out, that this is unfortunate fallout from the nature and stresses of their mission, but for a second there, the Iceman facade cracks, badly.

Some other thoughts on "A Burning Dog":

• Major Eckloff, the officer who marches onto the bridge and gives Encino Man the football-themed pep talk, is played by Ben Busch, whom "Wire" fans might recognize as Officer Colicchio, the hot-headed Western district narcotics cop with the awful haircut. Busch actually served as a Marine for two tours in Iraq, rising to the rank of Lt. Colonel. Note that Eckloff can tell how badly Encino Man is handling things, but rather then chew him out, he gives him a pep talk in a language (football) that he knows the guy can understand. That's something resembling genuine leadership, and it's the kind of thing First Recon could use a lot more of.

• Also note that Eckloff is able to shut down Captain America with little more than a stare. Even though he's heeded Kocher's warning about the AK's (he gathers up a bunch and then tosses them into the river), he seems more out of control than ever.

• I like the moment where the reporter comes to Colbert with what he thinks is a brilliant, left-field observation about where the mortar fire has been coming from, and Colbert politely but firmly explains that he knows what he's doing, thank you very much.

• Despite all the heavy fire they've taken, Pappy having to be casevac'ed because of his foot is the only real loss the Marines have suffered so far. As Pappy himself notes earlier in the episode, they're so good at what they do that they're preventing command from realizing what asinine decisions they keep making.

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Generation Kill, "Combat Jack": Stop... or my Trombley will shoot

Spoilers for episode four of "Generation Kill" coming up just as soon as I cook a goat...

You're now basically caught up with me. I've seen part of episode 5, but I reached a point where I decided I'd rather watch each episode closer to when I was going to blog about it, so I'll be watching 5, 6, and 7 at roughly the same pace you will. The decision was less about not wanting to inadvertently spoil things (it's really not that kind of show), but because I was having a harder and harder time reconnecting with each episode as I had to write about them, even with the extensive notes I take for stuff like this.

I bring this up because, from what I remember at the time, I wasn't that fond of "Combat Jack," at least relative to the previous three episodes, but now I'm not sure how much I can trust those memories.

Specifically, I didn't like the detour we took with Captain Patterson (the shorter, wiser Encino Man lookalike) and Alpha as they went on their mission to recover the body of the crucified Marine. I know that chronologically, this is the point in the story when the incident happened, but it feels like we're too deep into the miniseries to be spending so much time with a different, albeit related, group of Marines. One of the commenters said that episode three was the best so far because he could finally start telling the characters apart. So just as we're all getting to recognize all the personalities in Bravo, it doesn't seem like a great time to go off on a chaotic mission with Alpha.

That said, the material with the Bravo guys was very strong, particularly the road block sequence at the end. Outside of IEDs, stories of nightmarish roadblocks seem to be the most frequent kind of tale coming out of this war (the one really memorable part of FX's "Over There" also involved a roadblock), and the two roadblock scenes -- Bravo shooting up the truck, and Fruity Rudy and Meesh coming upon the aftermath of another roadblock shoot-em-up -- illustrated just why those things are so terrifying, even with superior firepower on your side.

Some other moments I liked:

-Doc tells off Encino Man. If I didn't know that he had actually called the guy incompetent and gotten away with it (Wright documents the exchange in the book), I wouldn't have believed it.

-Kocher (Colbert's counterpart in second platoon, played by Owain Yeoman) warns Captain America what would happen if he fired one of his AK's again. Come to think of it, this was a good episode for the grunts briefly standing up to their idiot leaders.

-Espera compares Trombley to Dylan Klebold, one of the perpetrators of the Columbine massacre. Also, Trombley's admission that he gets more nervous watching game shows than he does getting into fire fights.

-Colbert's contempt for organized religion was amusing, and also served as a nice counterpoint to the idea that the Iraq invasion was President Bush's own holy war.

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Generation Kill, "Screwby": Camel killer

Spoilers for episode 3 of "Generation Kill" coming up just as soon as I track down a photo I loaned out...

I'm running out of things to discuss in these weekly reviews, not because I'm losing interest in "Generation Kill," but because each episode is very much of a piece with the whole miniseries, and there are only so many ways I can analyze the dysfunctional relationship between command and the troops.

That said, there are two events in "Screwby" worth discussing.

The first is the decision to abandon the town where the locals claimed to be ready, willing and able to lead Fick and the others to hidden weapons and members of the Republican Guard. For all we know -- and Fick freely acknowledges this -- the informant could have been a liar just looking to get revenge on some local rivals. (He does, after all, promise to lead Fick to a chemical weapons cache.) But by rolling out quickly and leaving the guy with nothing but chem lights, they'll never know, will they? One of the fundamental complaints critics of the war have had with our invasion strategy was that we were in such a tearing hurry to knock over Saddam's army and get to Baghdad that we didn't properly ferret out all the bad actors who would wind up in the insurgency. In the book, Godfather talks to Evan Wright for a while about how he didn't understand why they weren't taking their time in each town to separate enemies from allies and do a better job at winning hearts and minds. The quick-strike invasion itself was a huge success, but it was like digging a tunnel without pausing to erect supports along the way: you'll get to the other side, but everything's going to collapse behind you.

(Though Godfather was obviously wise about what we should have been doing along the way, he makes one of the most bone-headed decisions of the story when he orders the abandonment of the company's supply truck just because he was in such a hurry to go capture the airfield and impress General Mattis.)

The other notable event is Trombley shooting the kid and the aftermath. Trombley is, in some ways, the most important character in the book. More than anybody else, he symbolizes Wright's definition of what Generation Kill is all about: a young man weened on video games, excited to go out and get some regardless of the target or the value of the mission. In the book, he often comes across like a sociopath, and you can tell that's the reason, and not his relative lack of training, that makes the other Marines dislike him so much. Even in an alpha male group like this, Trombley was too gung ho, you know?

The way Billy Lush plays Trombley doesn't really invalidate that interpretation, but he deepens the character as written on the page. Lush's Trombley still isn't someone I would likely want to spend time with, but there's this odd sweetness to the performance that I wasn't expecting, that humanizes Trombley without betraying Wright's portrait of him. That moment where he asks Colbert if he -- Colbert, not himself -- is going to be okay because of the shooting incident showed tremendous self-awareness at the same time it showed that Trombley wasn't remotely as troubled by what happened as Colbert was.

Feel free to talk about any or all of the other incidents in "Screwby" -- Fick risking his career to prevent the idiotic Encino Man from dropping a bomb on his own troops, or the village getting destroyed entirely because two different units didn't have the same comms, or Captain America's latest idiocy -- but even though I continue to enjoy "Generation Kill," I find myself at a loss for things to write about it each week.

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Generation Kill, "Cradle of Civilization": Everything turns to poo

Briefer than I'd like (hey, it's press tour, and Coolio is being really loud outside my window) spoilers for episode two of "Generation Kill" coming up just as soon as I earn my stories...

As First Recon really pushes into Iraq, at one point becoming the northernmost-unit of the invasion, we begin to get a sense of just how FUBAR the entire operation is. Or maybe that's just the way it seems from ground level.

The mission they've been training for gets scrubbed, with no real explanation. Godfather and Sgt. Major Sixta continue to push for the shaving of the moostashes -- and Sixta finds a way to do it that completely kills all the buzz from second platoon surviving the ambush -- and we start to see just how much Godfather is motivated by a desire to do something glamorous and exciting to impress General Matis (played by Hey! It's That Guy! Robert John Burke), regardless of whether it makes sense for his men. They're still inadequately supplied, and after Fick is assured that they'll enter a town under cover of night, we immediately cut to the Marines entering in the daytime. Captain America gets hold of an enemy AK-47 and begins firing it indiscriminately -- never a good idea in a combat zone, given how the Marines are trained to differentiate the sound of their own weapons from those of the enemy, right?

And yet, within that, we begin to get a sense of just how good and smart the Recon Marines themselves are. One of my favorite moments in the episodes I've seen comes the bit where they're rolling through the town, and Colbert reassures Trombley not to panic, without even needing to turn around to see either Trombley or whatever it was that Trombley was apparently scared of. This is a man who pays such close attention to detail that he judges the quality of his bowel movements to help assess his combat readiness; this is a man you do not want to mess with, I think.

(This episode had going number two on its mind quite a bit -- albeit all of it drawn from the book -- as we also got the whole bit about leaving toilet paper and other detritus around versus the neatness of the Afghanistan mission, as well as the Iraqi woman watching a Marine casually take a dump in her yard.)

I'm not sure, to be honest, how much I care for the scenes that are just of Godfather, or Godfather with Mattis, etc. Evan Wright's explanation for why the miniseries is more opaque than the book is that Simon wanted to put us into the heads of the Marines on the ground, and/or Wright himself, and that all the explanatory details about the mission and what's happening away from Colbert's Humvee is stuff that Wright found out way after the fact. And if that's the case, then that makes thematic sense. But then throwing in material about the higher-ups, stuff that the Recon Marines aren't privy to (as opposed to a briefing that Fick might attend) seems to go against the spirit of that. I'd rather the storytelling either adopted an entirely Colbert-centric point of view or else became omniscient enough that some of the chain of command stuff helped to clarify exactly what was going on.

Getting back to Colbert, it's really interesting to observe the dynamic inside the Humvee. Because he's so good at what he does, and because he carries himself in a certain way, his humor sneaks up on you. When he busts on Trombley for knocking up his girlfriend, it sounds at first almost like he's taunting him, but after a while it becomes clear that, no, that's just how Colbert sounds when he's cracking a joke. James Ransone as Person is the obvious standout performance in the mini, but I'm really enjoying watching Alexander Skarsgard work.

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Generation Kill, "Get Some": Po-lice that moo-stash!!!!

Spoilers for the premiere episode of "Generation Kill" coming up just as soon as I get a sit-rep as to J-Lo's status...

"You know what happens when you get out of the Marine Corps? You get your brains back."

I had originally planned to devote a good chunk of this post to explaining who the hell everybody is, how the recon Marine command hierarchy is structured, what the terminology means, etc. But I had an epiphany the other day when I sat down to rewatch "Get Some" and I realized that I wasn't remotely as lost as I was the first time. (If you need the Who's Who assistance, Mo Ryan has all the relevant PDF files hosted on her site.)

Sure, it helped that I had seen the next three episodes after that, and that I had frequently turned to my copy of Evan Wright's wonderful book when I was feeling especially dumbsquizzled. But, like Simon and Burns' "The Wire," I think "Generation Kill" is a show that throws you into the deep end of the pool, and after some thrashing around, you discover that you can swim. With or without the study aids, by the time you get to the end of episode 2 or 3, I suspect you'll get it. Admittedly, Simon makes things tougher than he needs to be in spots. The actors cast to play Encino Man (Lt. Fick's incompetent immediate superior) and Capt. Patterson (the leader of a different company in First Recon) may as well be brothers (especially when seated), and I don't think the miniseries uses Lee Tergesen's reporter character as much as it could to simplify things. (If nothing else, a scene where Tergesen is introduced to all the officers and told who reports to whom wouldn't have been the worst idea in the world.) But so long as you know the five people in the picture above -- from left to right, lead Humvee driver Josh Ray Person (James Ransone), the reporter, second platoon leader Lt. Fick (Stark Sands), lead Humvee team leader Brad Colbert (Alexander Skarsgard) and first Humvee gunner Trombley (Billy Lush) -- you're good to go. Other characters will be important and/or interesting as time goes on -- Fruity Rudy, Captain America, Godfather, Sgt. Major Sixta -- but the guys in that first Humvee are (with the exception of the turret gunner, who's a minor character at best) well-established even by the end of episode one.

But if the world that Simon, Burns, Wright and company drop us into can be confusing at first (mirroring, as they intended, the confusion that Wright felt at the time), it's a fully-realized one that's both thousands of miles away (literally and figuratively) from the Baltimore of "The Wire" and one that will feel very familiar to anyone who spent a lot of time watching McNulty and Bunk drink at the train tracks. The two biggest similarities similarities -- both of them very present in Wright's book, and in no way transplanted in by Simon and Burns' worldview -- are:

1)A mission that, on paper, is noble -- Who doesn't think drugs are harmful? Who doesn't think Saddam was a bad guy? -- but that maybe wasn't the best use of resources and was certainly not well planned-out in terms of an end game; and

2)A command hierarchy where the people who understand the problems the best (the cops on the street, the Marines on the ground) have the least authority, while the people making the decisions are far removed from the action, and whose orders therefore bear little resemblance to the realities their men are faced with when carrying them out.

While "The Wire" was inspired by true events in the lives of Simon, Burns and people that they knew, there was plenty of room to fictionalize as needed. Simon calls "Generation Kill" a fictionalized version, to some extent, of Wright's travels with First Recon, but he also has this text he has to follow, and so the themes and characters aren't all one to one. Colbert isn't McNulty, Person isn't Bunk, Godfather isn't Burrell, Sgt. Major Sixta isn't Rawls, etc. Still, as I read about and then watched the series of snafus that accompanied First Recon's entry into Iraq -- Encino Man getting the company lost because he duct-taped his windows shut, the piss-poor communication of orders from command to the troops, Colbert being ordered to let what would turn out to be death squads go without even asking some routine questions, and the climactic, "Three Kings"-ish moment where Fick has to "unsurrender" the Iraqi citizens and send them walking back in the direction of the death squads -- I couldn't help but imagine Dominic West asking, "The &*%^ is wrong with this military?"

As Simon has done throughout his career with the cops and criminals of Baltimore, Wright's book did an impressive job of reporting on the behavior and language of the men he covered without presuming to judge it. Much of what Person -- the miniseries' breakout character, and maybe the part that gets people to remember Ransone for something other than Ziggy's enormous member -- says, at great length and speed, is vile, offensive, reprehensible... you pick the adjective. But even as he's cussing out the image of some cute and oblivious elementary school girl, or suggesting that the war wouldn't have happened if Saddam had sent the Republican Guard to Vegas, you can tell that he's letting off steam -- and overcaffeinated, and overtired -- and his disgusting rants (and off-key renditions of "Sk8er Boi" and "Loving You") become almost -- no, forget "almost" -- charming.

I could talk in more generalities about "Get Some," but because this is a self-contained miniseries, we're going to be covering a lot of the same thematic ground over the next six weeks, plus this is late, so let's move on to a few specifics:

-In some ways, "Generation Kill" is one long, strange, violent road trip comedy, and as funny as Ransone is as Person, he needs a great on-screen buddy to make it work, and Alexander Skarsgard (son of Stellan) provides that. You can tell that Colbert can never decide whether he's annoyed or amused by his driver -- probably because he usually is feeling both at the same time.

-As mentioned in today's feature story on the making of the miniseries, Fruity Rudy is played by the real Fruity Rudy (Reyes) himself, because Simon and the casting team couldn't find a Latino actor who was both beautiful enough and convincing enough with all the New Age-y aspects of Rudy. Here's a Simon quote that got massively trimmed from that story for space reasons: "John Huertas, who plays Espera, after he read the role, he told me we first had him read for Rudy Reyes, 'And I read his lines, and the (bleep) he was saying about good dharma, and I thought this was the worst-written piece of (bleep) I've ever read! What the (bleep) is this (bleep)? And then I went to Africa and I met the real Rudy, and I'm like, it's dead on!' Rudy's like a unicorn. They just don't make 'em like that."

-Sgt. Major Sixta (referred to in the book as The Coward of Khafi) is played by Neal Jones, who you may remember as Chief Reilly's gay son from "Rescue Me," and he never fails to crack me up every time he starts mangling the English language and giving the Marines grief about their mustaches. I asked Wright and Eric Kocher (played in the miniseries by Owain Yeoman, and the miniseries' technical advisor) whether Sixta actually sounded like that. They said he did, and it wasn't even because he was Southern (I think they said he was from Nebraska), but because for some reason all Marines of that rank somehow decide they need to use that accent.

That's it for now. Sorry I couldn't get it done in time to post it after the East Coast airing finished. I'll try to do better next week.

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Sepinwall on TV: 'Generation Kill' preview

Today's column features Team "Generation Kill" -- producers David Simon and Ed Burns, author-turned-producer Evan Wright and Marine-turned-technical-advisor Eric Kocher -- telling the story of how the book, and then the miniseries, came about.

As I'm going to be away from my computer for a good chunk of today, I had hoped to have my blog review of episode one all ready to post as soon as it finished airing on the East Coast. But schedule crunches and some writer's block have gotten in the way. Maybe I still get it up in time, maybe not, but I'll do my best to have something to offer on it before Fox begins its turn at press tour tomorrow morning. Click here to read the full post