User reviews

We are introduced to this new TV show with a a couple of the Special Ops members in Afganistan, in disguise as locals. The divert the attention of some local army commander and then lock in on their target, a military supplies guy, give the OK and a jet sends a missile down on him and his building, blowing everyone to bits.

We are then introduced to the wives of these guys and the commanding officer of the group, -"Colonel Tom Ryan" (Robert Patrick) and then go to Idaho where one of the same guys "Jonas Blane" (Dennis Haybert) has a new recruit, "Bob Brown" (Scott Foley) with him and they are visiting a former member of the group. By coincidence (?!!) a mid-sized charter plane is hijacked in the northern part of the state by Middle Eastern people, so Jonas and Bob head on up, with reinforcements on the way.

In the meantime, the hijackers kill three National Guardsmen to tried to break into the plane from the rear and are executing a hostage every 20 minutes.

It looks like Jonas, Bob and the rest of the team have to stop this nonsense in a hurry.

This was a very good opening episode and gives me enthusiasm to continuing watch. I just hope they don't go too much into soap opera, stuff, such as I saw in the last 30 seconds of this episode.

I love any show that celebrates sacrifice and patriotism. The fact that it's well cast, well written, and very well acted is gourmet icing.

No spoiler here. This pilot episode establishes the main characters and sets the mood for the rest of the season. The Unit thrusts you, adrenaline pumping, into the world of the United States Army Special Forces.

In this episode the Unit, a secret detachment of highly trained U.S. military operatives, are tasked with stopping a jet liner high-jacking in progress. The team must arrive on location without alerting the enemy, board the aircraft, and terminate the terrorists before they kill another hostage. Meanwhile, the wives of current Unit members meet the wife and daughter of SSG Bob Brown, a new soldier to the team. While she is adjusting to Unit life, she learns what the Unit's mission truly is... to do violence on their behalf, so they and the rest of the U.S. may sleep peaceably at night.

-- I for one cannot wait for the second season to start.

I had two reasons for going back to watch this series: I just completed watching all seven seasons of the more recent series "SEAL Team" and I have always been a big fan of Regina Taylor since her starring role in the series "I'll Fly Away" which centered on the early days of the Civil Rights movement in a southern town of the 1950's. She plays a similarly strong African-American woman in this series, sometimes struggling against indifference, ignorance and discrimination of a different sort in support of not just her family, but the other families around her.

Reviewers who dismiss the story lines reflecting on the role of the spouses as a throwaway element to keep women viewers watching are missing a central reality of the military community. It's the spouses left behind who shoulder an outsized burden in terms of finances, child rearing and elder care for in-laws as well their own parents who make it possible for Special Operators to operate at all. The toll of broken marriages in real life statistics around military marriages in general and the Spec Ops community in particular shows just how hard it really is. Without the story lines including the spouses, this series would be leaving out half of the real story.

Some of the themes followed in SEAL Team are shown in this series as well. SEAL Team definitely benefited from a bigger budget and higher production values than The Unit, but this show definitely did a great job portraying similar sorts of missions for the time it aired and within the constraints it had compared to the later show. It's definitely worth a second look from anyone who liked SEAL Team.