@glennganges Published Sep. 13, 2026, 12:00 p.m. ET
Add Decider on Google More On: Stream It Or Skip It Stream It Or Skip It: ‘High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam’ on TNT, Where Joel Kinnaman Is A CIA Analyst With A Great Mustache — and a Sitdown With Saddam Hussain Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Stolen Heartbeats’ On Netflix, A Micro-Thriller About A Hot Male Nurse Who Communicates With The Spirit Of A Woman In A Coma Stream It Or Skip It: ‘A Killer Story’ On HBO, A True Crime Docuseries About A Journalist And Citizen Sleuths Trying To Free A Woman They Think Was Wrongly Convicted Of Murder Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Perfect Lie’ On Netflix, A Thriller Where A Mysterious Death Dredges Up Secrets Among A Group Of Rich Friends In real life, Joel Kinnaman is wearing chainmail at Burning Man. But in TNT’s 8-episode High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam, Kinnaman plays a mild-mannered Central Intelligence Agency analyst who finds himself face-to-face with one of America’s biggest boogeymen.
Opening Shot: Washington, DC, March 2003. “12 years since Bush Sr. pulled out of Iraq,” John Nixon (Kinnaman) tells us in a voiceover. “Everyday I wake up and think ‘Is today the day we go to war with Iraq?’”
The Gist: The inherent conflict in that statement is emphasized in High Value Target. Nixon, an analyst and Saddam Hussein expert, knows that Bush is putting the US into a (new) war with Iraq as a kind of re-do for what his father couldn’t accomplish. But he’s also required to supply the administration with intelligence supporting its public assertions, namely that Saddam is harboring weapons of mass destruction. All they gotta do is find him. Nixon spends his days at a desk in the bowels of the CIA, chasing “an infinite supply of bad leads,” his briefs full of reasoned outcomes and historical analysis ignored.
That is until it’s decided to source the intel firsthand. Nixon will be sent to Iraq as part of the CIA’s spooks on the ground, where the search for Saddam, aka “HVT #1,” and his closest family members and allies will occur as part of ongoing US military operations. Once Nixon gets some face time with the dictator, he’ll have to consider the human side of a figure that all the analysis and political chatter made out to be a monster.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Joel Kinnaman, master of disguise! He shows up here in full nerd alert mustache, but just concluded a lengthy run on For All Mankind where he played an 800-year-old man in space.
Our Take: We can’t wait for John Nixon to get to Iraq. Whether the analyst was actually present in real life, as Hussein’s hidey-hole was located, feels like High Value Target trying to make the bookish Nixon into a Jack Ryan-like frontline warrior. (This series is “inspired by” Nixon’s memoir, Debriefing the President.) However, once he’s in-country, we’ll at least be moving toward Nixon’s actual interviews with the dictator. We’re intrigued with that eventual head-to-head matchup. Because while he’s still at home, High Value Target characters like John’s wife Rebecca (Rebecca Lewis), stricken with MS, or his father Charles (Tom Berenger), with his shouts of “‘Murica!” at the TV, lack any dimension whatsoever.
Performance Worth Watching: Dar Salim has a few standout moments here as a US Army translator in Iraq. Salim is always solid in these roles, especially when they’re soldier-adjacent; see The Terminal List: Dark Wolf.
Parting Shot: Nixon’s Army veteran father preaches “situational awareness” as his desk jockey son prepares to enter a war zone.
Our Call: Joel Kinnaman — and his mustache — will keep you in High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam. Strong at the center, he makes this series a STREAM IT, since it loses focus on the margins.
Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.
