THE debut of an Iraq war mini-series — the first time that a US conflict has been dramatised for the small screen while it is still in progress — has had scathing reviews from soldiers who have fought in the real thing.

More than four million people tuned in on Wednesday night to watch the first episode of Over There, which turned out to be an hour of sex, gore and graphic battle scenes.

The show’s creator, Steven Bochco, whose television police dramas Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue won him high praise, insists that the 13- episode Over There recreates the reality of the Iraq war without politicising it.

At a time when public support for the war in the US is slipping — 53 per cent of Americans now believe that the conflict is “not worth it” — some television critics have praised the series for bringing the bloody reality of the war into living rooms in a way that news reports do not.

But a group of veterans who viewed the pilot episode said that the show was “pure Hollywood” and overtly anti-war.

In the final scene a US Army truck pulls on to the verge of a road, triggering a roadside bomb. One soldier loses his leg above the knee and chaos ensues. “People don’t act like that when an IED [improvised explosive device] goes off,” said a first lieutenant. “They make us look like idiots.”

The make-up of the fictional unit is also a Hollywood cliché: two women, two black men, one Arab-American and a Hispanic. They arrive in Iraq and meet for the first time, something that almost never happens in real life.

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