The war's false premise

Twenty-three years after the invasion, it is settled that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. TNT's limited series builds eight episodes on top of that fact.

Adapted from a CIA memoir

The source is John Nixon's 2016 book "Debriefing the President." Daniel Stiepleman and Jonathan Wakeham turn the analyst's account into a drama about capture, interrogation and execution.

Miscast lead, magnetic Saddam

Joel Kinnaman is badly wrong for Nixon. Waleed Zuaiter's Hussein is the opposite, charming one moment and menacing the next, and he takes the show with him.

“a terribly miscast Joel Kinnaman”

An agency chasing ghosts

The CIA burns months on leads that go nowhere. Nixon, who has studied Hussein for decades, tells his bosses they are wrong and gets waved off for being condescending and green in the field.

“his colleagues are barking up the wrong tree”

The analyst goes to Baghdad

Nixon finally talks his way into Iraq and is plainly unready for it. Bombs, bazookas and terrified families later, he ends up on Operation Red Dawn when Hussein is pulled from a tunnel.

The room where it works

Nixon breaks protocol in the interrogations and concludes Hussein is telling the truth about the weapons, and that Iran is the real problem. Selling that to the Bush administration is the harder job.

True, and still exploitative

Abu Ghraib and the daily cost of Hussein's terror land hard, but the montages and briefing-room dialogue smother them. Restaging this as entertainment feels futile for a country already fracturing.

“reimagining it as entertainment not only feels exploitative but futile”