Say what you will about its politics—the military-industrial complex has produced some rockin' movies! Top Gun, Blackhawk Down, Zero Dark Thirty, and many other DOD-sponsored films were given a very patriotic share of hardware to play with in return for their deference. So it is a mystery why CBS’s SEAL Team, a show that would crawl under a mile of barbed wire to lick the boots of a Tier One operator, is such a cheap piece of shit. It’s shot mostly in Afghanistan, California, with other scenes in conference rooms and the cargo bay of a C-17 that is clearly not moving. Chunks of every episode are filmed in sickly green night vision, which is never murky enough to hide the fact that Bravo Team keeps breaching doors on the same sets. There have been unsung cornball network shows capable of mounting a solid imitation of an action movie—Orci/Kurtzman’s Hawaii Five-0, for example, could put the money on the screen. But in SEAL Team the screen is always full of David Boreanaz moaning about his family. I know you weren’t planning on watching it, but I wanted to let you know you were right.