David Hume Kennerly Keith Robinson, Kirk "Sticky" Jones, Erik Palladino, Luke MacFarlane and Omid Abtahi in "Over There." Click photo for larger image.

CHATSWORTH, Calif. -- In the hills north of Los Angeles, actors pretend to be soldiers, running across a dirt field, storming a faux village. It all transpires under a blazing hot summer sun that makes this barren land a passable substitute for Iraq -- as long as the camera avoids catching a glimpse of the Los Angeles megalopolis that peeks between hills to the southeast.

It's here that FX's "Over There" (10 tonight) is springing to gritty, gory, nerve-jangling life as it depicts life for an Army unit in Iraq and for their loved ones back in America. Last week's premiere attracted 4.1 million viewers, on par with the series premiere of FX's "Rescue Me" last summer, which ties both series at No. 8 among the Top 10 basic cable series premieres of all time.

(The first episode of "Over There" was released on DVD by Fox Home Entertainment yesterday; it retails for $9.98.)

Created by Chris Gerolmo (an Oscar nominee for the "Mississippi Burning" screenplay) and Steven Bochco ("NYPD Blue"), a 1966 graduate of Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon), the first episode of "Over There" ended with a gruesome scene as a beer run turned disastrous when an Army truck hit a land mine.

Texan Bo Rider (Josh Henderson), who joined the Army with a dream of earning enough money to supplement his college football scholarship so he can attend Texas A&M, suffered a terrible injury. His right leg was mangled in the explosion and had to be amputated below the knee.

For Henderson, one of the singing stars of The WB reality show "Popstars 2," his role in "Over There" hits close to home. Bo plays football; Henderson played baseball. Bo hasn't seen his father since he was 6; Henderson has never met his father. Bo loses a leg; Henderson's cousin lost a leg in an auto accident.

"My cousin is an amputee in the exact same spot Bo is," Henderson explained during lunch near the set last month. "He's my body double any time you see my character [from the chest down]."

Henderson's character will spend the remainder of the show's first season recovering, first in a U.S. medical facility in Germany and later stateside.

Robert Zuckerman Luke MacFarlane, Nicki Aycox, Josh Henderson, Kirk "Sticky" Jones, Lizette Carrion Click photo for larger image.

"Originally, I was excited about doing the boot camp process and being in on the action, but my action got cut off very early at the end of the pilot," Henderson said. "The good thing is my character goes through a lot of really hard-core, intense stuff, and I knew it would be a challenge."

The show's technical adviser, Staff Sgt. Sean Thomas Bunch, spent 10 years in the Marine Corps, including a tour of duty in Iraq. He put the cast through a week of boot camp to help make them look as authentic as possible (Nicki Aycox, who plays the uncontrollable Mrs. B., passed out while carrying a 70-pound backpack, according to one of her co-stars.)

With Bo in recovery, tonight's episode introduces an Arab-American soldier, Tariq Nassiri (Omid Abtahi), who replaces Bo in the unit under the command of "Sgt. Scream" Silas (Erik Palladino).

Palladino, best known to TV viewers as the cocky Dr. Dave Malucci on "ER" in the late '90s, finds himself the cast's veteran just a few years after being the newbie on his previous series. The 37-year-old actor said after his "ER" role, he was typecast as an arrogant jerk.

"That's not who I am," he said. "I feel like I get a new start with this show."

"Over There" also proves to be new ground for Gerolmo, who's also a musician. He wrote a song two years ago during the bombing of Baghdad that he performs as the "Over There" theme (it plays over the credits at the end of each episode). Though he's worked as an acclaimed feature writer, Gerolmo has never before written a weekly television series.

"I'm not the show runner in the technical sense," he said. "The fact is, Steven is helping me. You can get up to speed very rapidly when you're working with one like this."

Bochco, who has a history of collaborating on series (with David E. Kelley on "Doogie Howser, M.D." and "L.A. Law" and with David Milch on "NYPD Blue"), said Gerolmo is doing the bulk of the writing for "Over There."

"You always work to the strength of the person you're collaborating with," Bochco said. "Chris is an awesomely gifted writer, and so I'm not sitting down and writing scripts and teleplays. He doesn't need that."

Instead, Bochco is contributing story ideas and "maintaining some level of big picture overview in terms of what the cumulative impact of our stories will be, what our character arcs are and making sure those stay true to where we have always said we want to go."

That's not a political place. Bochco and Gerolmo declined to give their views on the current conflict for obvious reasons ("I don't want to politicize the show in any way," Bochco said), but in its first three episodes the series doesn't offer much of an opinion on the U.S. occupation of Iraq beyond the depiction of war as a hellish experience regardless of the politics that led to it.

"We're telling stories about these six to eight young people on the ground in Iraq and their loved ones at home," Gerolmo said. "I find that to be the stuff of really compelling drama."

The show won't attempt to do ripped-from-the-headlines plots, although sometimes current events do catch up with the show, including tonight's roadblock episode.

"I wrote it months before the Italian journalist had her disaster at a roadblock," Gerolmo said. "We wrote it because so many soldiers find themselves in those circumstances in Iraq, having to make those kinds of split-second decisions."

But at its heart, "Over There" is a character drama, Bochco said, "individual stories about courage, about failure of courage, about making decisions. ... It's stories about the way in which what you're doing has emotional, physical, psychological, economic impact on your family at home."

Bochco said he hopes American soldiers will embrace "Over There" and "tell me that we're doing a good job the way cops told me we were doing a good job for years [on 'NYPD Blue']."

Reviews from critics have been generally glowing; reviews from troops have been more mixed. A panel of Marines who watched with a Los Angeles Times reporter gave the show high marks. USA Today did a similar story that interviewed troops who were more critical but generally positive. Iraq War veterans who watched with a Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter gave "Over There" a pan, calling its depiction of duty in Iraq "bogus."

The only harsher criticism came three months before the premiere when the wife of a soldier serving in Iraq attempted a letter-writing campaign to keep the show off the air. Bochco dismissed complaints that a fictional TV show about a war should not be broadcast during that conflict.

"Any good cop show, 'NYPD Blue' springs to mind, is about an urban war that's ongoing ... and yet nobody says, 'Gee, you shouldn't be doing that show because it's going to be really emotionally disturbing,'" he said. "I'm very respectful of the disturbing imagery that a show like this or even 'NYPD Blue' is capable of evoking in people. I would always, with the utmost understanding and respect, invite that individual not to watch it. People have to make those judgments."

Bochco said he would not be disappointed if the series quickly becomes irrelevant.

"Nothing would make me happier than for all those men and women to come home tomorrow," he said. "If the cost of that was the end of this show, I'd sign that paper right now. But realistically, I don't think there's anything out there that would create a climate in which this show couldn't air on FX."

In addition to leading the show's writing staff, Gerolmo directed last week's premiere in which an Iraqi insurgent was literally blown away -- his torso exploded and his legs continued to walk a step before collapsing.

"That's a very complicated process," he said, describing how the special effect was achieved. The scene was filmed multiple times -- a shot of the background without the actor present, a shot of the actor running toward the camera and falling, a shot of the actor in a green suit (for special effects work), a shot of a rocket on a wire zooming toward the actor -- and then all those images were melded together on a computer to create the finished scene.

As the "Over There" troops face roadblock duty tonight and an Iraqi prisoner in next week's episode, their fallen comrade, Bo, continues to recover and dreams of rejoining his unit. That seems unlikely, but Henderson and his cousin/body double Clint Mabry said it's not impossible. Mabry, who works for the Challenged Athletes Foundation and has his own Web site (www.1footloose.com), points to U.S. Army Capt. David Rozelle, the first amputee to return to duty in Iraq. Rozelle chronicles his experience in the book "Back in Action: An American Soldier's Story of Courage, Faith and Fortitude" ($27.95, Regency Publishing).

"In season one, I'm going through all the things someone might go through: Wanting to get back to the unit, trying to overcome the reality that your dreams are shattered," Henderson said. "For the majority of soldiers, the reality is they're not going back; but with artificial limbs, it's definitely not an impossibility."