• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, April 17, 2025

A new World War II miniseries on Amazon demonstrates that sometimes the use of flashbacks can be so overdone that confusion reigns.

Flashbacks are a very common storytelling device in movies and TV shows, but I have never seen a single production with so many of them.

I think there are at least three in this new show, titled “The Narrow Road to the Deep North,” but there came a point while I was previewing Episode One that I was just not sure because they seemed to tumble over each other.

The series, which starts Friday, is mainly about the experiences of Australian soldiers serving in South Asia and the Pacific, including captivity as prisoners of the Japanese. 

In a Burma jungle, the POWs are forced to work as slaves building a railway that, if or when completed, will aid the Japanese war effort. 

It is a story that has been fictionalized many times, most notably in the 1957 movie “The Bridge on the River Kwai.”

The show centers mainly on a young, tousle-haired Army medic, Dorrigo Evans (Jacob Elordi, above photo, left), whose older self (played by Ciarán Hinds) is reminiscing about his younger self decades later.

In a scene not far from the start of Episode One of “The Narrow Road to the Deep North,” the older Dorrigo is seen taping a TV interview to promote a new book about the war.

He pointedly lectures his young-woman interviewer on the horrors of war, and how the reality of battle can never be adequately described or rendered in art, books, novels or any other medium. 

Delivered at the onset of a TV series that means to do just that, his brief discourse plays like a word of caution, intentional or otherwise, when watching this very show.

Another flashback, or perhaps more than one (I’m not sure), has to do with aspects of Dorrigo’s life either on leave or in the days or weeks before he first goes to war. 

Again, this was unclear to me, although much more of the first episode of “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” dealt with these interludes than the war itself.

In one of these portions, we learn that Dorrigo is in a serious relationship with a young woman of the Australian upper crust.

Later, in another portion, he falls heavily for another young woman, although this one happens to be his uncle’s wife. Both women look so much alike that at first, I could not tell one from the other.

This may have been a mistake in casting, or the resemblance is intentional for some storytelling purpose that was not evident to me in Episode One.

The show begins with the soldiers not in captivity, but passing time between engagements with the enemy. Was this before or after they were captives, or before or after the medic had an affair with his uncle’s wife?

So many questions, so little time. So for me, it’s off to watch some other show.

“The Narrow Road to the Deep North” starts streaming on Friday, April 18, on Amazon Prime.