MISS 22

Last night we finished watching the TV series of Catch 22 on Freeview.

I was very disappointed in this. How and why the writers, producers and director chose to and managed to ruin a modern classic is well beyond me. Joseph Heller, if he was alive would, I'm sure, have been furious.

They deliberately left out seminal scenes, scenarios and narrative lines with the result that the thread of the story and the 'moral' was lost. Once they'd chopped out all of this essential stuff they padded out the story and the 6 episodes with long rambling sequences that were never in the original book. The endless Milo Minderbinder sequences were, in large, fabricated without properly covering the 'war is profit' theme Heller intended. The long and laborious sequence about Yossarian hiding out with the Italians after nearly having his balls shot off is also fabricated and played for laughs which never come. The sequences while beautifully filmed are a Tarantino-like rip-off of The Godfather.

The series is beautifully filmed and well acted but the music and special effects too loud and annoying and they mask the dialogue which, as anyone who read Catch 22 will know is sharp, satiric and chock full of the ironies of life.

Essential characters are either eliminated or misrepresented. The writers of this crap either didn't read the book properly or don't have the brain-pan ability to interpret it. The narrative line is destroyed by being added to, some parts deleted or chopped about as a time-line. Heller cleverly constructed a circular time-line as part of the book's impact. War is hell of a funny in terms of the ridiculous bureaucracy involved in making it run but essentially war is hell.

I read Catch 22 when I was about 15 and it still resonates with me. The satire and irony still work and I think that I'll read the book again. I remember being disappointed at fist viewing of Mike Nicholls Catch 22 film in 1970  but on later viewings thought it was pretty good and captured Hellers 'war is crazy' theme well. The characters were faithfully rendered and the casting was superb although I always thought that the Colonel Korn and Colonel Cathcart characters had been transposed. The strengths and weaknesses of the characters were handled well though and the meaning of Orr's deliberate crash landings and Arfy's twisted 'frat-boy' logic about rape were put across brilliantly.
Not in this mish-mash though. I'm sure that to viewers who haven't seen the 1970 film or read the original novel these characters were just background.

In summary I feel that the creators of this show didn't catch the meaning of the book at all. They missed it by a mile.  They should be ashamed of themselves. They won't of course and will most likely be awarded for the efforts by the various, in-house awards systems and be given shining reviews by young and under-educated critics. Joseph Heller's dark humour is lost in this with the deadpan acting of the Yossarian character failing to deliver the manic edge that Heller intended - the sane man in a world of madness being seen to be insane by being different - Catch 22.