The Unit is a very entertaining series. Because of the many reviews I spare you the story content and lengthy character descriptions. The action and tactics on screen seem believable for the average TV viewer (translates to: non-professional in the military, police or security sector) although I think this might be different for people in this kind of profession. The stories concerning the unit men and their missions are usually quite good, at least for the first two seasons, as were the wives' stories until that point. Starting at the beginning of the third season (cut short to 11 episodes due to the writer's strike at that time) the stories became progressively weaker and the wives stories became headache-inducing. Now, I recently bought the fourth season on DVD and wish I hadn't. The stories are mostly outright silly, the look of the action and the behavior of the unit members seemed a lot less professional and the wives stories were unbearable (sometimes I wondered if I had zapped over to Desperate Housewives, other times I could not wrap my head around the craziness of sending untrained housewives on military / recon missions - who in the writing room had that idiotic idea?). The quality of the writing here was so far below that of the first two seasons and even the third that one must wonder what caused this. If I might propose a theory: During the first two seasons, Eric Haney, one of the real members of that covert ops unit, was shown in the credits as a producer. In seasons 3 and 4, his name was notably absent (although because of the writers' strike, the stories of season 3 were mostly older concepts) . And overboard went the attempts to "keep it real" and on went the writing room madness. A little more drama for a lot less accuracy. Very, very bad decision. Another bad decision was shifting the focus from 80% unit action and 20% wives to a near 50-50 to capture the female audience. And those horrible story lines for the wives - oh no. If I could rate the seasons separately, I would give s1 9/10, s2 9/10, s3 7/10 and s4 4/10, which makes an average of 7.
