So the folks out at the Military Channel (via the folks at Gaiam) sent me a copy of Special Ops Mission on a two-disc DVD set.  I’ve never actually seen this show before (Military Channel is in the uppermost tier of Dish Network, and I don’t shell out that kind of cash on TV), and so it was all new to me.

What I found was pretty interesting.

Special Ops Mission joins operator Whiskey Whiskey, Wil Willis by name, as he embarks on a series of infiltration, information gathering, and exfiltration missions, taking on a set of military types (who’ve actually been in the military, or “seen the elephant” as it’s sometimes called) who’ll make up the OPFOR (Opposition Force) who’ll be out to protect their objectives from being accessed, photographed, retrieved, or otherwise spoiled by Whiskey Whiskey out in the field.

The result is almost a strange kind of military game / reality show in which military forces put on a war game in front of our very eyes.  It’s a surprisingly compelling sort of reality that we’re watching, with loads of suspenseful moments.  There’s absolutely nothing that says Whiskey Whiskey has to get out of every episode “alive”, because it’s just a war game, after all.

They do have a sort of live ammo in this game–called Simunition, it’s like a kind of high-tech paintball in military calibers–so that does ratchet up the tension here as Whiskey Whiskey and the OPFOR of the day trade fire.  But we do spend a lot of time here on tension building that never really gets resolved.

Still, there’s plenty of tense moments and some occasional action, and when you couple that with the unique nature of what we’re watching here, the total package is surprisingly robust.

The Screenhead Ten Scale hands Special Ops Mission an eight out of ten for being both unique and interesting, but there are some problems here, and that brings the overall score down a bit.