Dark Hearts

A French special forces unit is sent into Iraq on the eve of Mosul's decisive battle in October 2016, tasked with locating and extracting the daughter and grandson of a captured French Daesh emir. Their operation depends on the emir's cooperation, which he conditions on that family's rescue, and that bargain forces the soldiers into tense negotiations, split loyalties, and morally fraught choices. The series follows team dynamics, fieldcraft, and the friction between military objectives and political pressures, showing how a single mission can ripple across personal lives and larger strategic goals without giving away any plot twists or the outcome.

Dark Hearts premiered in 2023 and was created by Ziad Doueiri, Corinne Garfin, and Duong Dang-Thai. The show leans into procedural realism and wartime detail, reflecting its creators' interest in political and military storytelling.

The series has not been widely recognized by major awards bodies; there are no prominent Emmy or Golden Globe wins or nominations reported for it as of its release. It has, however, been discussed in trade coverage and shown at some regional festivals, where its realism attracted attention from critics.

Viewers and commentators have picked up on the show's stark representations of urban combat and hostage negotiation, and certain sequences have prompted online discussion about how counterterrorism is portrayed on screen. The moral ambiguity of characters and the use of tense, handheld action scenes have been referenced in reviews and social media conversations, particularly in France and among viewers interested in military drama.

Audience ratings skew positive, with a user vote average of 8.08 out of 10 from 56 votes, reflecting solid viewer engagement. Critics generally noted the series' focus on themes like loyalty, the psychological cost of violence, and the messy overlap of politics and military operations, while some reviews pointed to uneven pacing and occasional underdevelopment of secondary characters. Overall it’s a dense, serious wartime drama that prioritizes ethical conflict and operational detail.