China Beach

A work of TV art. ... It's a major, major series - a masterpiece, with great characters. The writing is textured, deep, rich. [26 Apr 1988]

Unforgettable and not to be missed ... At times it overreaches, overdraws, oversentimentalizes. Yet among its excesses are troves of dark brilliance that mark "China Beach" as a potentially significant series.

Ambitious, adult and sexually sophisticated, another signpost along the road toward increasingly serious, and much more personal television. [26 Apr 1988]

The results are decidedly mixed in tonight's two-hour pilot, but this is a fairly serious effort that succeeds in stimulating interest because it tries to look at the war from a feminine (feminist?) perspective. [26 Apr 1988]

The China Beach premiere has its ups and downs. The downs are mostly in its too pat and predictable dramatic choices. It takes the easy road too often in its resolutions. Its bag of storytelling tricks is trite, undermining a greater potential that might have been tapped with less telegraphed, less easy calls. But there is much to admire as well. The acting and characterizations are uniformly splendid. [26 Apr 1988]

The writing is a notch above standard-issue TV fare, and the show follows its own adventurous, if sometimes bumpy, path.

China Beach's idea of switching back and forth in time might finally have given the series some true originality and style, but the device hasn't been smoothly executed; even devotees of the series have complained that these days, the shows tend to be confusing, choppy, and annoying.