The Director of Netflix's Marines Wanted the Military Docuseries To Be Apolitical

Despite the abundance of movies and shows about war, the common civilian knows strikingly little about what goes on in the military, particularly with active duty members. Netflix's new docuseries Marines pulls back the curtain on the armed forces' most notorious branch, embedding with soldiers of the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit stationed near Japan on the Navy vessel USS Green Bay with almost unprecedented access. What viewers will find is that the soldiers pass their days with a lot of gym time, a lot of anticipation, and a lot of boredom as they wait for a call for deployment that may never come.

What you won't find is politics. Despite the military being heavily politicized in the real world, there is nary a mention of foreign or domestic affairs in any of the Marines episodes, even from those who are giving their lives for the country. Not only was that by design, but it never even came up, according to director Chelsea Yarnell. 

"The people who we met [on the show] are all so different," Yarnell told TV Guide. "I think it would be wrong to simplify it [by aligning them with a political party]. But in general, people were very apolitical. I mean, I remember we were watching the [Donald] Trump-Kamala [Harris presidential] debate, and no one was really that interested. But yeah, in general, people were apolitical and wanted the series to be apolitical, and we didn't really think it was relevant, honestly." 

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Instead, Yarnell focused on the psyche of these young men and women in fatigues, learning what made them decide to enlist with a group that is usually the first called into battle during a conflict. What she found was an alarming comfort with violence, both dispensing it and being on the wrong end of it. Several discuss their youth and how they always knew that they wanted to join the military, with one mentioning how he's always wanted to kill "bad guys" since he was a child and another saying, "Violence is the only thing that makes life interesting…Everyone deserves a little violence."

"I was shocked at first by it, I think by their openness to talking about [violence]," Yarnell said. "If you're not in that world, talking about lethality feels very strange, and it does feel extreme. And I think that [as I spent more time with them], in their day-to-day and seeing what they do and how they train, I think that they have to be desensitized to that. Otherwise they wouldn't be prepared for what they potentially might have to do in the future. So I think it all makes sense, but it was absolutely shocking [to hear it] at first."

Working on sports-centric shows like Last Chance U and America's Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys, which dive into the personal lives of their subjects when they're not competing, was essential to making Marines work. Even though there's no actual combat in Marines, the pressure of the job is always increasing during training, and we see a totally different side to the soldiers when the pressure valve is released a little during downtime and their returns home.

"Using those really small human moments is what sets the series apart, I think, from a lot of other military content," Yarnell said. "And it maybe subverts expectations of military content, in a way, because we are telling a more three-dimensional story of what a deployment is like, rather than just like, including the action pieces, which are also extremely awesome, but I think prioritizing the smaller, more human moments is what makes our series unique and also makes our characters so relatable."

Getting those moments required a ridiculous amount of access granted to them by the Marine Corps. Yarnell emphasized that the Marines had zero creative control over the docuseries, and she was shocked at how much freedom they had on the USS Green Bay. 

"We felt a pressure to make this series reflect the reality of a deployment as authentically as possible," Yarnell said. "We really were given the type of access that filmmakers can only dream about." 

Marines is now streaming on Netflix.