Keith Carradine was offered the role of Queeg, and it would have reunited him with director Robert Altman for the first time since Nashville (1975). Carradine turned it down due to a conflict with another movie starting Glenn Close. Carradine later regretted it, and Altman never reached out to him again for another role.
This tele-movie was made and first broadcast about thirty-five years after its source play of the same name by Herman Wouk had been first performed in 1953.
Peter Gallagher's first film with Robert Altman. He would reunite with the director for The Player (1992) and Short Cuts (1993).
Bogosian/Lt. Greenwald is in a US Navy Gray uniform, in use from 1943-1949. FADM King ordered it to replace the khaki uniform. It didn't last.