No Man’s Land presents an intriguing story of a man getting sucked into the fight against ISIS, joining forces with the little-known (at least in the West) YBJ.

No Man's Land tries, and sometimes succeeds, in illustrating relationships between characters through frivolous conversation, but there are bigger issues that are ignored — and instead of making the Syrian civil war universal, the show renders it generic.

While making a show about the conflict in Syria that barely seems interested in the actual people of Syria destroys most of the dramatic thrust of “No Man’s Land” from beginning to end, there are performances that keep it from total disaster. ... Ultimately, “No Man’s Land” suffers from a lack of direction.

A resolutely unimaginative exercise in orientalist condescension, the thoroughly flat No Man’s Land treats the civil war as a tourist destination, and most of its insights about how the conflict became a playground for the West are decidedly unintentional.

It’s grim about how complicated and full of conflict the lives of these people must be, but “about” is as far as it gets. It’s about the fact that it is complex, not actually about its complexities. The result is a series that swings from dull to chaotic, back and forth.