I remember thinking this was about as good as an action TV show could get. The action scenes weren't over-the-top pantomime, and the characters meant more than just "he's the one who is good at sniping" or "he is good at blowing stuff up". I have now rewatched it, and it's brought up many thoughts that I wasn't expecting.
I first watched it when I was coming out of school, maybe 17-20ish, so I was anxious about rewatching it this year (2022). This show was written at an interesting, and, in retrospect, scary time in American history. Over-the-top jingoism has always been a trait of American culture, but this era is seeing a change we'd not seen before, at least in the past 150 years. This show is set too far from 9/11 to be able to excuse racism as trauma, but the media was beginning to accept it as commonplace once again. The 'PC culture' of the 90s (that didn't exist, but hey) was gone. This is when America's journey of splitting into different cultural worlds was completing.
The extremist right-wing, pro-military 'patriotic' part of the country separated itself from the entire rest of the world. They put themselves into a bubble, then later complained they were in a bubble. As we've seen, what that culture has evolved into can only be described as bonkers, going from glorifying patriotism to literally attempting a coup on the country they're meant to care about so much. I bring this up because any TV show that glorifies the military and violence from this era could be a terribly uncomfortable watch once I take my rose-tinted glasses off and look at it with wiser eyes. It certainly wouldn't be the first time.
The Unit doesn't hold up, either then or now. However, it holds up a lot more than it should. The **tl;dr** of this unnecessarily long essay that nobody will read is that The Unit is still worth watching, or rewatching, now. Just keep in mind the setting and notice that it's surprisingly restrained compared to what they could have gotten away with. That makes it watchable, interesting, but flawed.
As I watched, I was thinking about the missions they were trying to complete. Multiple fit in with what was happening at the time, you could go down some serious rabbit holes with them. Ultimately, who cares, just suspend disbelief, and enjoy the ride.
However, the majority bordered on problematic. Some, I'd argue, were necessary in a pragmatic world. You need to save someone, diplomacy has failed, time to send the scary men with no names. That was not where it stopped, though. Meddling in the domestic affairs of other nations was a common theme. Americans seeking to change other countries through violence is... questionable at best. In more cases than not, if you wanted to reduce the situation down to a binary, the Americans were the bad guys, and yet you felt like you were in a propaganda film trying to rewrite them as good.There were multiple moments where they said, 'we are soldiers, we don't make decisions, we simply enact the decisions of others'. That's a fair point, at the end of the day the soldiers are doing an incredibly dangerous job on behalf of people who may have motives and reasons that you don't even know about. You can't make a moral decision based on the mission you were given. But sometimes you can...
To their credit, one character later in the run does begin to realise this. He realises that no matter what the higher-ups are planning, the ends can't justify these means. Without spoiling it too much, others try to talk him down, but he sticks to his guns. It's a courageous piece of writing in a show that was quite heavy-handed up until them.
Ultimately, that might be a decent reflection of secretive units like this. They aim to kill everything about you, except the biological you. They build you back up as a murder machine with little ability to survive in the real world. They use you until you're burnt out, then throw you away. Over time those who manage to can mentally recover, but slowly. Through the show you meet men who are emotionally stripped bare and live a sad life, unable to connect with anyone, but it’s unquestioned or he’s okay because he’s a hero. Ultimately, the one who walks away cannot justify doing horrible things while risking leaving his family without a father, especially when the military has no interest in supporting your family after your death or disability.
In my opinion, this is the real story of this show. He's the main character, building incredible skills, doing incredible things, before realising none of it is worth it. That's what makes it rewatchable to me. Without this through line, this would simply be an action series that aged poorly.
Two final points - there is racism. Nothing specific, nothing targeted at an individual, but a lot of insinuation that the people they are fighting are savages or can't handle running their own country. Brown people are killed and thrown away as if they don't matter… because they don't. It is rarely discussed that any dead enemy is an actual human with a life as complex and interesting as the man who fired the gun. They are simply removed without consequence when the narrative slows down or as a prop in the story of an American. It's not unsurprising, this still occurs today, but it needs to be mentioned.
Finally, people tend to complain about the 'at home' element. First, obviously, religion plays a pointlessly large part, offering nothing to the characters, and all families must be 1950s nuclear families. Anyone else is considered weird, including the characters who aren't in relationships, and they tend to meddle with anyone they believe is wrong according to their religion. This could be considered realistic, expected even, largely because of the show’s targeted demographics on CBS.
The problems they encounter can be uninteresting. When it’s not bordering on a soap opera, the wives sometimes have side adventures that cause them to complain about anyone who protests putting their husband's lives in danger and/or the military in general, but simultaneously complain about their living situation. Families are a liability to the military, something they do because they'd have no soldiers without putting in the bare amount of effort. Part of the wives’ roles on the show is to defend their own terrible circumstances, and act as political mouthpieces that seem clunkily hammered in.
All of that said, you need a reason to care about the shooty bang bang hero man, and shows that even a man who has gone through the hellish process of having all personality stripped from his character, that emotion still endures and can effect their job. I think the family perspective adds more than people might first realise, especially the character who can’t justify leaving his family, but I wish it was done a lot better. The show would be worse off without it, but it’s the bare minimum.
