Fall Guide to Good TV: Occupation

In the riveting, wrenching Occupation, Northern Ireland native James Nesbitt plays Mike Swift, leader of a unit of British soldiers on a tour of Iraq. The series opens with a harrowing 10-minute battle scene, dramatically scored by Massive 
Attack’s “Teardrop.” Then the action shifts back to England, and the viewer realizes that war itself is only part of the story. Occupation is also interested in what Nesbitt calls “this terrible gulf between the soldiers and their families when they come back home, in terms of trying to release what they’ve seen—what’s happened to them.”

When Swift falls for an Iraqi doctor (and Swift’s brothers in arms find their own reasons to return to the war zone), we realize that this is an unusual war story, one that explores the deep psychological bonds soldiers form, not  just with each other, but with war itself. The show was written by Peter Bowker, whose angle drew Nesbitt to the project. “I was was immediately taken by his ‘in,’” Nesbitt says. “His way of trying to capture something about the conflict which we don’t already know about from news. That’s one of the challenges, I suppose: How do you make drama out of that situation when, really, news gives us everything we need to know?” 

What news can’t easily cover, though, is the psychological turmoil and ambiguous morality of a war zone. “There is no right in this country,” one Occupation character says. “It’s just wrong, and wronger.”

Though shooting Occupation, Nesbitt has undergone a psychological transformation of his own. “I gladly marched against the war with a million other people in London,” he says. “But having said that, I’ve come back with renewed—actually, completely new—respect for soldiers themselves, and what they’re prepared to put up with, and what they do.”