The drama of human conflict makes for great television; it has been a recurrent theme in the work of Steven Bochco all the way back to his landmark 1981 creation, “Hill Street Blues” – a cop series that zeroed in on the personal side of the fight against crime in its depiction of bickering grunts in the squad room of a Chicago police precinct. He has always had a remarkable affinity for the way we war; even when he moved in 1986 to the glitzy world of lawyers in suits in his smash hit “L.A. Law,” Mr. Bochco never lost sight of the entertainment value of grappling opponents. That show coupled the backstage bickering of men and women with the courtroom battles that gave it weight. His natural desire to pit people against each other in front of cameras has made him a television titan, and allowed him multiple chances to redeem his reputation despite a string of notable failures in recent years.

I wish I could say that “Over There” – his new FX series set in the Iraqi war zone that debuts tomorrow night at 10 p.m. – will put Mr. Bochco back on top, but instead it’s more likely to seal his reputation as a producer past his prime. What was once a fresh and exciting theme now comes off as shopworn and obvious. The cast of characters he and screenwriter Chris Gerolmo have created lack the charms of past Bochco ensembles; instead, the soldiers of “Over There” suggest every war story cliche you’ve ever seen. With nicknames like “Dim” and “Scream” and “Smoke” and “Doublewide,” I didn’t know whether I was bored or lost, or both. Do any of us need to be told that a soldier’s life is hellish, rough, and full of inner torment? If the purpose of “Over There” was to jolt our emotions with the tragedy of war, it failed. I wasn’t moved for a minute, except by sadness for how far Mr. Bochco has fallen.

I was surprised by the scarcity of heart-wrenching drama in “Over There”; that had always been Mr. Bochco’s specialty. If anything, it was the excessive schmaltz of “L.A. Law” that made it, in the end, too much of a soap opera to be considered a television classic. But here he paints with too narrow a brush, and with frustrating results. We’ve seen all these stick-figure characters before: the temperamental hothead; the college-boy dreamer; the cynical, seen-it-all sergeant; and the ambitious would-be hero, thrown into combat together to fight a war none of them understands. In an effort to shake up the genre, Messrs. Bochco and Gerolmo throw in numerous scenes of the war at home – the struggles of families and loved ones to cope with the absence of these young soldiers – that serves only as an annoying distraction to the action. Had he kept his focus tight on the war, he might have forced himself to find unexpected dimensions to his characters, and kept us engaged by their shifting attitudes and allegiances.

But nothing is left to chance in “Over There.” It’s all earnest and direct and profoundly self-important. The music, the cinematography, and the editing hammer everything home with a self-consciously heavy hand. We’re supposed to care very, very deeply about these people, which is precisely why we don’t. Even the introduction, in Episode 2, of Tariq Nassiri, an Arab-American soldier, turns instantly predictable when he wins the loyalty of his fellow troops through an act of heroism that overwhelms their suspicions before the hour is up. It’s a flagrant manipulation that makes “Desperate Housewives” look like an oasis of subtext and subtlety.

Critics may admire Mr. Bochco’s seeming courage in tackling the touchy subject of Iraq, but I found his politics as confused as his storytelling. There seemed no clear point of view in “Over There,” not even on the simple issue of the collateral damage of combat. It’s tough, perhaps impossible, to present a weekly series about a dangerous war in which none of the principal characters die – and that fundamental weakness is just one of many obstacles to real drama that keeps “Over There” from working. Mr. Bochco would do better to return to the metaphorical battlegrounds that once served him so well, and leave war to the professionals.

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Let us now take a moment to memorialize James Doohan, the ruddy Canadian actor who played chief engineer Montgomery Scott, or Scotty, on “Star Trek” and who died last week at the age of 85.

We owe Doohan a huge debt of gratitude for having given millions of us the chance, at one point or another, to get a cheap laugh by repeating his immortal line: “I’m givin’ her all she’s got, Cap’n … if I give her any more she’s gonna blow!” Scotty single-handedly kept the Enterprise moving despite weekly crises involving the ship’s warp drives and reactors – and with remarkable calm, I thought, given the endless demands of space’s ultimate speed demon, Captain James T. Kirk.