Review of United States of Al

I tried watching this show when it first began broadcasting, and it stuck me as shallow and unrealistic. Watching the opener tonight for the second season, I'm heartened that the show is finally attempting to deal with the serious issues surrounding Afghanistan and now it's fall to the Taliban. Having spent time in the Middle East and having also been evacuated from a country there during a revolution, the circumstances under those kinds of conditions are much more traumatic and emotional than what still comes across in this sitcom. The show doesn't display adequately and realistically enough the kind of emotional roller coaster that people actually experience during these kinds of events where one worries if one will live or die. I don't know if the problem lies with the writing, the acting, the directing, or all three, but this show need serious revamping that gets us, the audience, involved in the emotional anxiety of these characters. It is more comforting to not feel like we are living the problems others are having, and so we tend to distant ourselves as people sometimes do traveling with a tour group in some foreign country where they watch everything from the windows of their bus or train with always a barrier between the society we have come to explore and the sanitized environment provided by the tour. We need to be drawn in, and doing this now, is so very, very important because so many of us living in our isolated worlds have trouble even having empathy for our neighbors, let alone for people who have had everything torn away from them. This first show of this second season is an improvement over what came before, but we audience members must be taken to the places where the real people trying to get out of Afghanistan are or to those left there to live under Taliban rule live. Unfortunately, we are still keeping the TV screen between us and them.