Generation Kill boasts a starring cast of 28, including that chap who played Ziggy Sobotka and several other Wire alumni, and comparisons with David Simon’s other shows don’t end there.

The first episode is fairly baffling, as like The Wire, Generation Kill seeks to recreate its subject matter as accurately as possible, complete with initially indistinguishable characters, mumbling dialogue, background noise and technical jargon.

If Generation Kill is to be believed – and it is based on a factual account by a Rolling Stone journalist – then most soldiers spent their time making homoerotic slurs about each other and trying to find somewhere to have a comfortable crap or a sneaky wank.

The long periods of tedium also make the battle sequences and violence all the more shocking, thrilling and appalling when they do happen.

Also like The Wire, you empathise with (almost) all of the characters, no matter how awful their mistakes. And terrible mistakes are made in Generation Kill: there are dozens of people in the miniseries killed by the invading army, several by the main characters, who who are quite certainly civilians, some of them children. But it is still extremely hard not to sympathise with the marines, who by and large are doing the best that they can.

The only possible let-down in Generation Kill is the portrayal of “Captain America”, who seems to fill every cliche about the worst atrocities of the invasion – randomly shooting at everyone, brutalising prisoners, and generally acting like a stupid bastard. He seems just a little over-the-top to be completely believable.

But, perhaps, even this portrayal is accurate, which is a very scary thought indeed.