2022 - 2023
Echo 3 is a ten-episode military thriller that ran on Apple TV+ from November 2022 to January 2023. Ten episodes, one season, cancelled in mid-2023. Apple pushed it hard at launch. It never found the audience the platform needed to justify a renewal.
The creator is Mark Boal, making his first move into television after winning two Oscars for screenplays, The Hurt Locker in 2010 and Zero Dark Thirty in 2013. Boal came up as an embedded war-zone journalist before he wrote features, and that reporter's discipline is all over the show. The series is produced by Page 1 alongside Anonymous Content, and it is an adaptation of the Israeli drama When Heroes Fly, which landed on Netflix in 2018.
The premise is straightforward. Prince Haas (Michiel Huisman) and Bambi (Luke Evans) are two American special-operations soldiers, close as brothers, who find themselves in an impossible situation. Prince's sister Amber Chesborough (Jessica Ann Collins), an American scientist doing field research on the Colombia-Venezuela border, has been kidnapped by forces tied to a violent insurgency. Amber happens to be married to Bambi. The two men go off the books and mount an unauthorised rescue mission that takes them across South America.
The triangle at the heart of the show carries almost all of it. Huisman plays Prince as a man who has learned to turn panic into operational calm, and the role lets him do the quiet, contained work that Game of Thrones and The Haunting of Hill House fans will recognise. Luke Evans as Bambi is the looser of the two, a talker and a fighter with a harder edge, and Evans is well cast against type here. Jessica Ann Collins as Amber refuses to play victim in the usual TV-drama sense. Her scenes in captivity work because the show trusts her to carry real scientific intelligence and real fear at the same time.
The supporting bench is strong:
Gusmán and Raba are Latin American stars well known on home turf, and casting them in roles that actually speak Spanish for long stretches is one of the show's better choices.
The surface is a cross-border rescue thriller. Underneath is a study of what happens when two elite soldiers point all their operational training at a personal problem.
Luke Evans
Bambi
Mark Boal
Creator
Juan Pablo Raba
Violeta
Emmanuel Esparza
Tessa Pérez
Martina Gusmán
Natalia
Jessica Ann Collins
Amber Chesborough
Bradley Whitford
Mitch Chesborough
James Udom
Nassim
Boal is interested, as he always has been, in the gap between the clean version of special operations and the messy human version. The Hurt Locker put addiction to the job on screen. Zero Dark Thirty tracked the cost of a decade-long manhunt. Echo 3 asks what happens when the mission is your sister-in-law and your brother-in-law at the same time, and the rulebook you usually work by does not apply.
The show also sits inside a real conversation about American military activity in South America, the spillover of Venezuelan instability, and what a private rescue looks like when no government will sanction it. Boal handles that context with the reporter's restraint you would expect from him. He does not preach and he does not get on a soapbox. He shows you the logistics, the moral compromises, the local politics, and lets you work out how you feel about it.
Location photography is the show's calling card. Echo 3 was shot extensively in Colombia and neighbouring countries, and you can feel it in every frame. This is not a Vancouver-standing-in-for-South-America production. Humidity, dust, the specific greens of the jungle, the specific architecture of border towns. All of it reads real.
The combat sequences are filmed in the lineage Boal established at the movies. Tight geography. Close quarters. A camera that stays at eye level rather than cutting every half-second. You can follow the action and you can follow where people are in the room. Gunfire sounds loud and wrong, the way it does in Generation Kill and the way it does in Boal's own Hurt Locker. There is no John Wick rhythm and no Jack Bauer fantasy. When a door gets breached you feel the risk in the frame.
Score is used sparingly. Sound design is loud. When a character gets hurt, the show makes you sit with the aftermath instead of cutting to the next set piece.
Echo 3 arrived with heat. Apple TV+ ran a substantial marketing campaign and positioned it as the next big prestige action play after a strong year for the platform. Critics were split. The Boal pedigree got credit. The pacing, particularly in the middle episodes, got pushback. The show runs ten hours and some viewers felt the story could have been told in six or seven.
Audience numbers never climbed to the level Apple wanted. The cancellation came in mid-2023 and the story ends with the season finale, for better or worse. Some threads land. Some do not.
Apple backed it, Boal delivered a recognisable version of his cinematic voice, and the audience simply did not show up in the numbers required.
In the crowded special-ops-and-spies lane on streaming, Echo 3 now sits as a one-and-done curio. It is closer in DNA to Generation Kill than to The Terminal List. It shares research-minded realism with Homeland and The Americans rather than the pulp adrenaline of Reacher or The Night Agent. Viewers who liked Narcos and Narcos Mexico will recognise the Colombian setting and some of the political grammar.
At the sentence-by-sentence level Echo 3 is better than its reception suggests. Boal writing television is Boal writing television. The dialogue is tight, the procedural detail is accurate to a degree most of the genre never reaches, and the chemistry between Huisman and Evans sells a friendship that has to survive some genuinely ugly decisions.
Is it the best show in its lane? No. Slow Horses and Tehran are doing more interesting work. Is it worth ten hours if the Boal signature matters to you, if you came out of Zero Dark Thirty wanting more, or if you just want an action thriller with actual adults in it? I think it is. I would recommend it to anyone who can handle a slow middle stretch and wants a rescue story told by someone who has actually reported from a war zone. The show deserved a second season it never got.
Michiel Huisman
Prince Haas
Elena Anaya