The Long Road Home

The Long Road can be tough to watch--I saw the first three episodes--but it does seem like it’s essential to. Excellent and unflinching.

The Long Road Home stands above the pack as a truly heart-wrenching and often breathtakingly harrowing display of bravery, valor and sacrifice under fire. [30 Oct 2017 - 12 Nov 2017, p.13]

The Long Road Home is beautiful and heartbreaking. It is not always easy to watch, but its truth is so magnificently insistent, you cannot look away. Without question, it is one of the finest television offerings of the year.

Characterization is not the strong suit of The Long Road Home, but the actors do their level best, and directors Phil Abraham and Mikael Salomon excel at depicting the camaraderie of the soldiers as well as the chaos that envelops them at several key moments. But The Long Road Home could have trimmed its overlong running time by cutting out all the home-front storylines.

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.

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.

Eight hours, frankly, stretches the story in a way that creates uneven patches. Although it allows more time to develop characters and their histories -- including flashbacks before their deployment, and jumping ahead beyond it -- those arcs perhaps cast too wide a net, diluting the powerful moments by creating more space to drift into melodrama.