Imagine that you are a television executive, and you want people to watch your new primetime show about a “tier one” Navy SEAL element.  You order the usual publicizing, send the actors out to appear on morning and late night television shows, advertise in the appropriate newspapers and magazines, and air the necessary commercials to generate interest.

Then someone in your office suggests maybe reaching out to the growing community of veterans out there in television-viewing land, to see what they think.  Someone else then goes on to suggest maybe previewing the show for a website run by Navy SEALs and other special operations veterans.  Surely, an executive must have had some second thoughts about such a plan, perhaps thinking to his or herself, “what if they hate it and trash it?”

In other words, it is a bold move providing a preview of a show about the Navy SEALs to a website like SOFREP.  It could feasibly result in a terrible review, and an admonition from the website’s former special operations veterans to avoid such ridiculous crap at all costs.  To overcome that hesitation, said television executives must have had at least one key factor weighing in on their decision to go ahead and do it: confidence in the quality of the show.

Thus we arrive at the new CBS primetime drama, “SEAL Team,” which will begin airing at 9 PM EST on CBS starting September 27th.  Your trusted author will be up front with you: publicists from the network reached out to SOFREP (and no doubt other outlets within our lane) and asked us to preview the show.  They easily could have skipped such a step, if they thought it likely that SOFREP would trash the show.  However, they did not.  They clearly had confidence in the pilot episode, and wanted to get our take on it (and no doubt have us bring them some viewers).