‘High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam’ Brings One of America’s Most Famous Manhunts to TNT

More than two decades after Saddam Hussein was pulled from a hiding spot in Iraq, TNT is going back inside the hunt that led to his capture but High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam isn't only interested in telling us how he was found.

The new eight-episode limited series premieres Sunday, September 13, with Joel Kinnaman starring as CIA analyst John Nixon, the man who ultimately found himself sitting across from Hussein after spending years studying him. Waleed Zuaiter takes on the role of the former Iraqi dictator in a story inspired by Nixon's memoir, Debriefing the President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein.

We already know how the hunt ends, of course. Saddam Hussein was captured in December 2003, and images from that moment became some of the most recognizable of the Iraq War. That's exactly why High Value Target has to find something more interesting to say than simply recreating history audiences already know, and thankfully, the hunt itself is only part of the story.

‘High Value Target’ Goes Beyond Saddam Hussein’s Capture

The series begins during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, with Hussein missing and American forces trying to figure out where he went. Nixon is initially working from afar before eventually heading to Baghdad and becoming directly involved in the search, but finding Hussein changes the story rather than ending it.

Nixon became the first American to positively identify Hussein and later spent hours interrogating him. Those conversations gave Nixon a much closer look at the man he'd spent years analyzing, while also forcing him to reconsider some of what American intelligence believed about Hussein, Iraq and the decisions that led to the war.

That's where High Value Target could get really interesting. A series about soldiers searching for Saddam Hussein is one thing, but a series about the CIA analyst who finally gets him in a room and realizes the situation may be considerably more complicated than the intelligence reports suggested gives TNT much more to work with.

With eight episodes, there should also be enough room to explore both sides of that story without racing from the invasion straight to Hussein's capture.

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Joel Kinnaman Takes on John Nixon

Kinnaman feels like a pretty natural fit for this kind of material. Between For All Mankind, House of Cards and The Killing, he's spent plenty of time playing characters caught inside institutions where politics and personal judgment don't always agree.

Opposite him is Zuaiter as Hussein, which may be the more difficult performance of the two. Everyone knows who Saddam Hussein was, and plenty of viewers have very specific images of him burned into their memories. The challenge will be portraying the person Nixon encountered during those interrogations without allowing the character to become either a caricature or something more sympathetic than history warrants.

Lena Góra, Dar Salim, Tom Berenger and Christopher McDonald are also among the cast. The series comes from writer and director Leslie Greif and is based on Nixon's memoir, with production traveling to Egypt and locations around Cairo used to recreate both Iraq and Washington.

TNT Has a Pretty Unusual Premiere Plan

Here's the part viewers will definitely want to know before setting the DVR. TNT premieres the first two episodes Sunday, September 13 at 9 PM ET/PT, but you won't have to wait another week for Episode 3.

The network is bringing the series back Monday, September 14 at 9 PM for its third episode. Yes, that means three episodes in roughly 24 hours, giving viewers quite a bit of High Value Target right out of the gate. Episode 4 then arrives Sunday, September 20, followed by Episode 5 on Monday, September 21, as TNT continues moving through the eight-episode limited series toward its October finale.

It's an aggressive way to launch a show, but it could work particularly well here. Rather than asking viewers to spend three weeks getting through the setup, TNT can get the search underway and move much closer to the Nixon-Hussein dynamic that really separates this story from the countless documentaries and dramatizations we've already seen about the Iraq War.

Is ‘High Value Target’ Worth Putting on Your Radar?

There have been plenty of movies, documentaries and television specials about Saddam Hussein and the Iraq War over the past two decades. High Value Target needs a reason to exist beyond giving us another recreation of a story whose ending is already sitting in the history books, and John Nixon's perspective might be that reason.

Instead of stopping once Hussein is captured, the series gets to explore what happened when someone who had studied him from thousands of miles away finally sat across the table from him. What Nixon learned during those interrogations — and how that compared with what the United States thought it knew going into Iraq gives High Value Target a much more interesting hook.

Between Kinnaman, Zuaiter and a perspective that takes the story beyond the manhunt itself, High Value Target has enough going for it to make this one worth keeping an eye on when it premieres this weekend.

High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam premieres Sunday, September 13 at 9 PM ET/PT on TNT.