# A Saddam drama that forgets to be a drama

> TNT spends eight episodes on the hunt for Saddam Hussein and buries its best material under war montage.
- Title: A Saddam drama that forgets to be a drama · Variety | Shortify
- Summary: TNT spends eight episodes on the hunt for Saddam Hussein and buries its best material under war montage. The interrogation scenes are the whole show, and…
- Keywords: television, iraq war, tv review, tnt, limited series, entertainment, culture, Saddam, drama, forgets, Variety
- Source: Variety — https://variety.com/2026/tv/reviews/high-value-target-the-hunt-for-saddam-review-tnt-1236854909
- Author: Aramide Tinubu
- Published: 2026-09-13T15:30:00+00:00
- Read time: 1 min
- Topics: television, iraq war, tv review, tnt, limited series, entertainment, culture
## 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
## Key takeaway

The interrogation scenes are the whole show, and they are rationed out too thinly to carry eight episodes.