From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to the treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. You can also hear the show at KCRW.com.

Paranoia, frustration, and patience. Not the kind of things you think of. You think about

a war story, but the seven-hour miniseries Generation Kill and HBO deals with just that.

The director of four of the episodes, the first three in the final, Susanna White is here.

Thanks, first of all, for doing the show. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me on it.

It comes from the book, but tell the audience a little bit what's about it. It's based on Evan Wright's book, Generation

Kill, and Evan is a journalist who, um, embedded with the first reconnaissance unit. And did dispatches

for Rolling Stone. Right. Exactly. And, um, we follow his journey on the first 40 days of the war as first reconnaissance unit spearhead the invasion.

And we tell the story of that group of guys.

And what you really get a sense of is the incredible frustration and just the kind of tension that that frustration creates

and the fact that these guys are all built to go out and fight and they're completely over-prepared

and under-prepared.

That's what's great, I think.

In episode one, you see them all pumped up, ready to go, they're working out as a kind

of physical honing of them as they, you know, they see themselves in a up ready to go. They're working out as a kind of physical honing of them as

they, you know, they see themselves in a warrior tradition getting right back to the ancient Greeks,

that their warriors ready as a machine to go out and fight. And then you see their frustration

as it doesn't turn out in the way they were expecting. And one thing I really love about the series is the boredom of war, the downtime.

And it's mostly the downtime.

Yeah.

And that's when you really get to know the characters that they talk about their backstories,

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