It's not like I have time for TV, but I watched HBO's 6-part miniseries based on Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and despite my early enthusiasm for a new adaptation and willingness to give wide latitude in considering it, I hated it by the end, forcing myself unenthusiastically to watch the last 3 episodes (after enthusiastically watching the first three episodes before realizing something was off). It was quite a disappointment.

I'm pretty sure I've mentioned before that I watched the 1970 Mike Nichols film in high school and absolutely loved it. Then I read the book and absolutely loved that even more. It's one of my favorite books from high school days. Then I re-watched the film sometime later and didn't love it quite so much. It just didn't compare to the book, although I think if I watched it now I'd be much more forgiving, giving it wide latitude, especially since this mini-series showed me how badly an adaptation can go wrong and totally miss the point of a work.

Given the nature of the source material, wide latitude needs to be given to any adaptation. There's a loose plot which isn't particularly important and mainly serves as a foil to describe and embellish, chapter-by-chapter, upon all these oddball characters and oddball situations that paints a decidedly non-oddball context (WWII) into something oddball and absurd in itself. Horrible incidents occur and are described in gory detail, injustices that make the blood boil are committed, but all are balanced with the word most often used to describe the book: satire. There's a joke in these pages, the absurdity and irony of war would make us laugh if it wasn't such a horrible reality. As satire, the work is supposed to make us laugh.

The mini-series goes fundamentally wrong by ignoring the satire (NB: an adaptation of a satire doesn't automatically make it a satire). It focuses on that not-so-important loose plot and treats it as a straight-forward, chronologically linear drama with literal depictions of events in the book while missing ironic and ridiculous subtexts. There is little to nothing funny about this mini-series, nothing absurd, ironic, satirical, sardonic or tongue-in-cheek. There's no tension between what's reasonable and unreasonable. There's nothing witty in the dialogue or the twists on logic. There's a lot that seems curious and weird because they're still using the satirical source material but are way off in rendering it and can't point to satire to explain it. Like when you try to crack a joke in a situation where no one feels like laughing.

The mini-series creates consequences to action where there should be absurdity, and just makes the protagonist loathsome, selfish, irresponsible, cowardly and immoral. Immoral? Modern wars are all pretty much immoral, but the mini-series seems to point to this one person as the epitome of immoral, when he's supposed to be the hero and one of the few who makes sense in all his absurdity. Confronted by an absurd situation, someone who is even more absurd sometimes makes the most sense. Instead, it's possible in the mini-series to count how many people literally die, directly or indirectly, as a result of "Yo-Yo"'s petty, short-sighted and self-serving actions and then witness his complete lack of remorse for his agency. Or maybe this mini-series is much more clever than I'm giving it credit for and it's saying something about the U.S. now. Probably not. Actually from the way they sequenced scenes, I'd say it was fully intentional that the viewer draw the lines of consequence pointing to Yossarian's culpability in many of the deaths of his comrades. The purpose for doing that eludes me because I just ended up disgusted with the guy and not caring what happens to him (the exact opposite from the book).

However I could be wrong. The reviews are good, although many seem to be doing the limbo to praise it and none have convinced me. I admit the look of the mini-series is very aesthetic and the performances and technical aspects decent. I'm not panning the series for what's not there (I think every reviewer did what I did when the mini-series was announced and re-read the entire 400+ pages book). There's so much in the book that they had full license over what they chose to use and what they left out. Although with so much material in the book, I fail to see why they had to add things that weren't in the book. Actually, almost one entire episode (focusing on Milo Minderbinder) I don't remember even being in the book except as straight narration.

I wonder if another reason for the good reviews might be that there's not a single reviewer, I shouldn't wonder, who hadn't read the book and they're really gushing about the book. Or maybe they hadn't watched the whole series yet when they reviewed it.