The Long Road Home2017

For the most part, The Long Road Home would rather stick to stock scenes and manipulative sympathy-seeking that add up to "support the troops" messaging than tell messily human stories. Thus the miniseries is the latest pop-culture military production to fail to understand that you can powerfully do both.

This tautly emotional and up-close look at a mettle-testing day in Iraq seems certain to become its most resonant and valuable production to date.

A mostly conventional approach to a story framed around heroism and faith, it’s a show that does the most justice to its real-life inspiration when it resists its own impulses to manufacture drama where plenty already exists.