Yes Ma'am review: a long campaign for a very short attention span

The bottom of the ladder

You are the lowest recruit on the base, face down in mud, until Sergeant Diana Demont hauls you out and decides you belong to her. She commands the post. She is also married to the Colonel who runs everything around it, so every glance in the yard comes with a rank attached.

That is the premise of this Yes Ma'am review, and it is a good one for a short drama: authority, secrecy and one person who sees past the uniform. The description says nothing of how it ends, and neither shall we.

Chain of command

There are three figures worth knowing. The recruit is you, written in the second person, so there is no personality to admire, only a position to occupy. Sergeant Demont is the officer in charge, commanding in public and, we are told, a different woman in private. The Colonel is the husband and the hazard, the man whose name opens every door and closes this one.

We have no chat profile for her on this site, so here she exists only in the drama.

Heat under orders

The tone is a discipline-and-desire drama: crisp salutes, lowered voices and a secret that gets harder to keep as rank gets in the way. It is suggestive in the usual Candy fashion, with the interesting friction coming from who is allowed to say what to whom.

The risk of a thirty-episode run is that tension needs somewhere to go. On paper the set-up could carry a handful of episodes with ease, and we cannot say how it stretches over thirty.

Why it sits on 2.5 stars

Only one mark is flattering. Episode 1 lasts 63 seconds, a brisk start, so pilot pace is full marks.

The other two are the lowest the scale gives. Two free episodes out of thirty is a thin free runway, and a run of thirty episodes is the hardest on the shelf to finish. That is why the series sits last among the sixteen in our own order. It is a verdict on the format facts, not on the writing, which we have not rated. How we rate has the method.

The bill for a long service

Episode 1 is open to everyone, episode 2 needs a free account, and the other 28 episodes cost 12 tokens each, 336 tokens for the full run. Set that beside the 100 tokens in a Premium month and the sums are worth doing before you start; Pricing lays out the plans.

If you would rather not enlist

For a shorter workplace romance with a married lead, My Wife's Personal Trainer runs five episodes, and The Man Next Door Knows is a slow-burn marriage drama at nine. Thriller fans should try She Was Sent to Kill Me. Over on Dreamy Shorts, Silver Service sits in the six-episode bracket, and on Secrets AI Hot Money wraps up in three. Every free first episode is listed on Free Episodes.