Even Small Wars Look Big From Up Close. Because it’s time to update M*A*S*H.
Set against a United Nations peacekeeping mission, “Even Small Wars Look Big From Up Close” is a television dramedy that focuses a satirical lens on the impact that the press, aid-workers, and the United Nations have on Lower Semoro, an (invented and) nearly forgotten land that has been home to a guerrilla insurgency for decades.
Fueled by booze, recreational drugs and often an addiction to danger, the international press is populated by the dedicated and the damaged: men and women who report from far-flung lands when they know few readers are likely to care.
Aid-work, too, is as corrupt as it is effective. It’s populated by save-the-world peaceniks as well as “career humanitarians” whose decisions can be life-or-death in the morning and chardonnay-or-shiraz by night’s fall.
The series follows Rob Reston, a burnt-out journalist working in Lower Semoro, trying to retain his faith and integrity in journalism amid downsizing media budgets, and facing his failures in love and at the hands of his rival, Gavin Collins.
Far from being the realm of stuffy academics, foreign affairs – or at least a passing understanding of it – has become a common currency of our popular culture.
A viral video makes Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony a cause celebre. Starbucks boasts of its responsible entrepreneurship through coffee beans. The Arab Spring is credited in part to Facebook and Twitter. You can text Bill Clinton and send $10 to Haiti. It’s time for a closer look at this universe.
And that’s what George Clooney hasn’t figured out yet. The answer is not in well-intended fundraisers, or what amount to celebrity “guest appearances” in places like Sudan by him or an Angelina Jolie.
The answer is not to be found in nauseatingly Hollywood tripe about the heart-wrenchingly noble aid-worker, tormented by a secret buried deep within his past. We’ve all seen that show before. The template is tired.
The answer lies in tapping into the vein of comedy that already exists in the world of the press, aid-workers and policy.
The answer is to update M*A*S*H.
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Series creator M.P. Nunan has spent 17 years overseas working primarily as a freelance foreign correspondent - including in Afghanistan, Iraq, India, Indonesia, Burma, Bosnia, Cambodia, and East Timor, Thailand.
I have “fixed” for Ted Koppel’s Nightline, I have accidentally insulted insurgent leaders, and I have sipped tea on Mullah Omar’s (unoccupied) bed. Among my clients have been National Public Radio, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Voice of America, and the British Broadcasting Corporation.
For more details, please see my cv on “My Past.”
mpnunan@gmail.com/ 646-416-4192
