SEAL Team Season 7

 

        The first trailer for season 7 of SEAL Team dropped this week, and it’s nothing if not intense. It’s already racked up plenty of views and positive comments. As trailers go, it definitely does the job of whetting the viewers’ appetite for the season premiere on August 11. Some of the scenes brought to mind scenes in earlier seasons: Ray firing from the helo and Clay’s sniper shot from the helo (3x1); the bombing of the café and the bombing of the bar in Manila (2x17) and the café in Tunisia (4x4); and the comment about "invisible warfare" and the missions the team's done that would qualify as this (3x14, 5x1, 5x2, 5x10-5x14). I loved the trailer, and yet, I feel a nagging concern after viewing it. 

        The reason SEAL Team, from its first season to its sixth season, was one of the best drama shows on TV, network or streaming, wasn’t simply the acting (although that has been consistently excellent by every actor in the regular cast). What set SEAL Team apart was the writing, the ability of its writers to dissect and rip away the layers of the human condition of the men and women engaged in the “war on terror”: their strengths, their weaknesses, their fears, their hopes, their joy, their pain, their sorrow. While the missions and the action have been outstanding (especially given the limitations of a network show when it was on CBS), it’s been the moments where the characters come face to face with the trauma, the loss, the danger that’s inherent and inevitable in their chosen field and their efforts to control it, overcome it, or ignore it. It’s the balancing act, the tightrope, the characters are forced to walk between their work and their personal life and the damage that's done when they fall off. It’s this element in their lives that makes these characters human and not caricatures, that makes more real the enormity of their personal sacrifices, as well as the dangers and the difficulty of this life.

        The men and women of DEVGRU—the characters in SEAL Team—aren’t superheroes; they’re not avatars in a computer game. They’re men and women who face enormous pressure—physical, emotional, even spiritual—on both the battlefield and the home front, and it’s been the ability of the writers of SEAL Team to capture this two-pronged struggle in the lives of Tier One operators—more than the missions, the fighting scenes, the special effects, and the stunts—that’s lifted SEAL Team above an ordinary military show and made it an outstanding dramatic show. It’s not that Tier One operators are the only ones who have job requirements and duties that demand extraordinary training, physical ability, and personal sacrifice. There are other professions that require these, albeit often at a less intense level. But what the Tier One operator can’t do—that is possible in almost every other profession, including those requiring advanced training, physical ability, and personal sacrifice—is share details about their work with family and friends. How often do people release tension created at work by venting their frustrations to those closest to them? Conversely, how often, when something good happens at work, do people want to share the positive news with friends and family? A Tier One operator doesn’t have this outlet, and this demand of the job, to keep information sealed off from family and personal friends, can create added pressure on a family unit or a personal relationship. In addition, the irregular hours, the call to spin up at any moment, the deployments also make a “normal” life impossible. All these issues have been an integral part of the show because those fighting—and those who become casualties of—the “war on terror” aren’t only those in uniform.

        In the episode “Getaway Day” in season 1, Danny Cooper has a brief conversation with Stella (Clay’s girlfriend and new to the military life) while they’re at the home of Steve Porter, the leader of Echo Team, who was killed in Afghanistan along with his entire team. Stella and Danny are in the kitchen, and she looks out at Steve’s widow sitting in the living room surrounded by wives and SEAL brothers and says, “It’s really hard.” Danny says, “Yeah, the hardest part of war, pretty much.” She asks, “How do you mean?” and he replies, “What comes after.” (This conversation was an eerie precursor of what Stella would have to face.)

        I hope, besides the action on the battlefield, season 7 will include the battles the team members face in their personal lives. It will be more difficult because the show lost more than Clay when he died; it lost the only other established couple besides Ray and Naima (Jason and Mandy weren’t “established” by the end of season 6), and Clay and Stella introduced an element into the personal struggle that challenges many young military families: finding the balance between work and family when there’s a newborn. (I was hoping Stella would appear in more than one episode in season 7 because the show has never dealt with how a spouse lives with their partner’s death, and seeing how Stella deals with Clay’s death over time--the pain and loss, as well as the support she receives from the Bravo family--would've been a storyline worth telling.) I also hope Trent and Brock have more to do and more focus is given to them in season 7. I’m more interested in them than in any new character introduced in the final 10 episodes.

        There’s no way the writers can, in one season, create the camaraderie and relationships between the new members of the team to equal the camaraderie and relationships they created between the original Bravo members during the first six seasons. (In all the previous seasons the writers have given us human characters: sometimes strong, sometimes weak, at times full of self-doubt and at other times confident, more often experiencing pain than happiness, tired, angry, confused, but always supported by their brothers and even sometimes—if very lucky—being loved unconditionally by someone for who they are.) In season 7 I hope we get these complex characters again and the focus remains as much on their inner struggles as on whatever op (along with the corresponding action, special effects, and stunts) they’re given by the cake eaters.