Were they crazy trying to make a show built around a currently running conflict about which much of the populace has mixed feelings, to say the least? Commercially, the answer was clearly yes. But critically -- that's another story. Over There earned strong reviews in July 2005 and a dedicated, if small, fan base for its unflinching portrayal of the grunts who go wherever the big brass tell them to, led by the requisite tough sergeant (played by Erik Palladino of ER).

This was the first war, and thus the first show, to put both men and women in treacherous combat situations, and to really capture the stunning youngness of the people put in harm's way. The horror of traumatic wounds hit home from the first episode, where the show introduced storylines running at the base back home (where both wives and husbands waited), on the front lines of Iraq, and in the hospital where mangled soldiers battle to regain a sense of wholeness.

Embedded reporters, the use of torture, confusion with civilians, substance abuse -- it was all on the table, up front, in ways that were gripping to the show's fans, and off-putting, apparently, to other viewers who had their fill of Iraq from the news reports. Reality isn't always a great sell, as the cast of the smart series Under Cover had learned back in 1991, when their ABC saga of covert operatives got way too close to the first Gulf War. Debuting in January 1991, the series opened by sending its lead husband-and-wife team (Tony Denison and Linda Purl) to the middle east during an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait -- which actually happened just before the episode was to air. ABC pulled it, and Under Cover never recovered, airing just a few more episodes before vanishing forever. Somebody really should show this one again. (One of the show's co-stars was Kasi Lemmons, who became a highly regarded director of such movies as Eve's Bayou and Talk to Me.

TV has had more success looking back at wars past. One of the better reviewed series of the '80s was the '60s-set military drama Call to Glory, starring a pre-Coach Craig T. Nelson as an Air Force pilot with both political and family problems. Not only did Nelson's star rise dramatically afterward -- Glory ran 1984-85 on ABC; Coach was on the same network 1989-97 -- but so did that of the girl who played his teenage daughter, Elisabeth Shue, later to be Oscar-nominated for Leaving Las Vegas.

A la NBC's recent American Dreams, the ambitions of Call to Glory reached far and wide, encompassing both family dynamics, in an era when wives were questioning their roles and kids were rebelling (even more than usual), and a rapidly shifting geopolitical landscape. Nelson's Col. Raynor Sarnac started the series (actually launched from an 1984 TV movie) enmeshed in 1962's Cuban Missile Crisis, flying missions over that Communist country, then found himself in the midst of the civil rights struggle and later the Vietnam war.

He wasn't the only TV character coping there. A couple years later, CBS introduced Tour of Duty, an on-the-ground saga of an Army platoon slogging through South Vietnam. This one premiered in 1987, in the wake of Oliver Stone's hit movie Platoon. Terence Knox (St. Elsewhere) played their classically rough-and-ready leader, commanding an authentically multiracial/multiclass cast. Also acclaimed for its realism was the show's sense of not only combat action but the way the soldiers coped with it (drugs, sex) and with the cultural confusions of fighting in a foreign land. Even the larger political decisions determining their fate were examined in gritty fashion.

But Tour of Duty (1987-90) went a little sudsy itself after it got a Vietnam-era competitor: China Beach (1988-91), the female-centric tale of Army nurses sent to that southeast Asian country. This ABC saga from producer John Wells (ER) made a star of Dana Delany (Desperate Housewives) as lead nurse Colleen McMurphy, not to mention Marg Helgenberger (CSI) and Megan Gallagher (Millennium), along with Michael Boatman (Spin City) and Robert Picardo (Star Trek: Voyager).

Unlike M*A*S*H, the medical characters on China Beach had continuing interactions with their soldier patients, and they changed, and grew, in ways that bored into the hearts of late '80s viewers. (Who still long to see the show on DVD. But the soundtrack's extensive use of vintage pop songs likely makes for an expensive music-rights stumbling block.)

CBS's 1970s hit M*A*S*H is the most obvious other look-back at wartime, in its case the Korean war 20 years earlier. ABC's 1960s hit Combat also flashed back two decades, to World War II. But more often than not, war isn't just hell for those involved -- it's hell on TV ratings, too.