Catch-22: Season 1

Catch-22 is my favorite novel of all time, so when I heard George Clooney was directing a miniseries adaptation for Hulu I was excited but, you know, cautious. It's a book with such a specific, precise tone that really doesn't translate well to the screen, and they already tried to make it a movie way back in 1970 and it really wasn't so good. Granted, the whole thing's bound to work better in six hours than in four, but is George Clooney really the right man to bring Heller's weird mix of morbid war terror and absurd nonsense dialogue to the screen?

Turns out, yes! This was very good! It's a little heavier on the horrors of war, which is an advantage any any visual medium is going to have over the written word, but the cast does a pretty good job with the line readings and enough of the absurd humor is preserved for the whole thing to mostly tonally survive the transition from page to screen.

I was actually left a little disappointed by the ending - and granted, that's one of the book's flaws too - in part because I really think they could have stretched this thing to eight episodes form six. There are plenty of characters and subplots cut from the miniseries entirely that I think add plenty to the overwhelming sense of suffocating bureaucratic dread, like how one man in the squadron, clearly alive and walking around and talking to people, is declared dead because he was erroneously listed on a downed plane's manifest, or how the most powerful man on the base is the lowly private who runs the mail room because of his power to redact information in all the incoming and outgoing correspondence.

But yeah - top to bottom this was easily one of my favorite shows of the year so far. It's funny how that works, how at this point in time so many of my favorite shows end up being limited series, complete stories that start and end and never seem like they're just spinning their wheels, biding time, killing seasons. Anyway, give this show a shot! And maybe try the book. It's so good, you guys!