Critical Condition: Valor

Valor | Three, 9.25 Tuesday

➢➢ “I’m sure they must have mentioned a single character’s name sometime in Valor, the new CW show about a group of elite military helicopter pilots. But I watched the pilot twice, and then the first part of it again, and all I can come up with is Pretty Square Jawed Girl (Christina Ochoa), Nice Boyfriend (Charlie Barnett), and Sexy Cowboy Commander Man She’s Not Supposed To Sleep With (Matt Barr). I’m sure you can predict where that all ends up.” — Entertainment Weekly.

➢➢ “CW is known for casting particularly attractive young actors, but with Valor the network goes an extra step, offering a female soldier who is excessively made up, with eyebrows so well manicured she might just have stepped off the runway at New York Fashion Week. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with this, but it’s incredibly distracting on a show that depicts her in training or in combat.” — USA Today.

➢➢ “It doesn’t help that Valor looks like what you’d get if you took a similar NBC drama, The Brave, and slashed its budget by more than half. Beyond the bare-bones production values, Valor’s attempts to meld the soap opera conventions CW viewers are familiar with to a gung-ho military story are generally underwhelming.” — Variety.

➢➢ “Salute The CW for thinking outside the box with this military drama, but the weak mystery, thin cast and cheap production values are less praise-worthy … To some degree, unintentional laughs are what Valor brings to the military genre in place of the CBS procedural proficiency of SEAL Team or the ineffective cinematic grittiness of NBC’s The Brave.” — The Hollywood Reporter.

➢➢ “This is a series that makes every other show before it in this genre look like From Here to Eternity. Valor is overblown, badly cast, horribly filmed and my candidate for Worst New Show of Fall 2017.” — Boston Herald.