What Is It Good For?

George Clooney and friends adapt Catch-22 for TV.

- Matt Zoller Seitz

THE CULTURAL DEBTowed to Joseph Heller’s antiwar satire, Catch-22, becomes clearer when you watch Hulu’s handsomely produced miniseries. It feels familiar, even old hat because so many subsequent works have borrowed from it. The alphabet-soup acronyms and Marx Brothers malaprops; the “Who’s on first?”–style nonsense conversations; the frat-house slapstick alternating with homosocial tenderness and fathomless horror; the baseline cynicism about whether any war, no matter how nobly justified, can ever be classified as “good.” These and other elements were integral to M*A*S*H, Apocalypse Now, and Full Metal Jacket, and they resonate in recent works like Sorry to Bother You, Atlanta, Archer, Patriot, and the recent HBO miniseries Chernobyl, which showed how the human tendencies toward tribalism, greed, and ass-covering can make anything worse, even a nuclear accident. So in that sense, there’s nothing new to see here.

But in another sense there is. Where Mike Nichols’s 1970 big-screen version of Catch-22 compressed the story and went for a sketch-comedy approach—in the vein of Dr. Strangelove or Orson Welles’s version of