So has anyone been watching this? It finishes next week and holy shit, it's just built and built and built each week into a tour through hell that's unlike anything else I've seen on T.V. It's had its share of mis-steps (most egregious being the absolutely awful music which is completely at odds with the utter physical, emotional, and existential bleakness of the scenes depicted), but overall I think it's been incredibly well done. I've just finished watching episode 9 and there were parts where I almost had to cover my eyes, and parts where I was hoping it would stop soon because it was just too much to take. I've got to be honest, I don't know if I could watch this series again but I'm really glad it's been made. The overall message - "War is hell" - is pretty well-worn, but I've never seen it depicted so unflinchingly and so confrontingly.
Unfortunately, it's been pretty badly received in Australia, in no small part because Channel 7, which screens it here, has absolutely butchered it, cramming each episode full of ad-breaks and covering great swathes of the screen while the show is on with ads for upcoming shows and lottery results, and continuously trying to appeal to cheap jingoistic nationalism, going so far as to subtitle the series as "the Battle for Australia", which is patently absurd. What they've done to the show is practically criminal, but regretably that's the level to which commercial television in Australia has sunk.