The PlayTone World War II Trilogy
Tom Hanks and Stephen Spielberg
Band of Brothers:
September 9, 2001-November 4, 2001 (10 episodes, HBO)
The Pacific:
March 14, 2010-May 16, 2010 (10 episodes, HBO)
Masters of the Air:
January 26, 2024-March 15, 2024 (9 episodes, Apple TV+)
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| Band of Brothers |
When Saving Private Ryan released in 1998, it sort of jumpstarted a huge wave of World War II nostalgia. Suddenly everyone wanted to get in on the World War II craze, which took on a disturbing new dimension in the wake of 9/11 before finally petering out in the optimistic Obama years. Despite his film making a huge splash, and lots of money, Stephen Spielberg wasn't ready to let go of the war yet. In 1999 he oversaw the production of Medal of Honor, developed by his own game studio, Dreamworks Interactive; and a couple of years after that, he and Tom Hanks would executive produce the first of what I sometimes jokingly call the Saving Private Ryan Expanded Universe: Band of Brothers. The HBO miniseries was a smash hit; its followups, The Pacific and Masters of the Air, less so. Nonetheless, the three of them form a loose thematic trilogy (with more to come, imply Hanks and Spielberg) that takes a lot of what people liked about Saving Private Ryan and molds it into some excellent prestige television, all of which were produced under the auspices of PlayTone, Tom Hanks' personal production company.
Obviously we have to start with Band of Brothers; it came first, it was hugely influential, and it's arguably the best one. With its first episode releasing mere days before 9/11, it no doubt played a role in the post-9/11 zeitgeist, but don't be fooled, it's one of the best war series ever seen on TV. Based largely on Stephen Ambrose's book of the same name, Band of Brothers follows some of the men of the United States Army's 101st Airborne, from their training in Georgia in 1942, to landing in Normandy the night before D-Day, all the way to Hitler's notorious Eagle's Nest retreat in the Alps.
While there are easily a couple dozen characters of varying importance, the series largely revolves around Lieutenant Dick Winters (who finishes the series as a major.) Half the episodes feature him in some way, and he's never far away in most of the others. But the show does make time for other characters in Easy Company, from company medic Eugene "Doc" Roe to Private Albert Blithe, a quiet, navel-gazing soldier torn between wrestling with trauma and doing his duty.
There's something curiously documentary-like to Band of Brothers; based as it is on the experiences of real people, some of those very same soldiers being depicted in the show appear in interviews at the beginning or end of every episode, though the show is careful to not display any names until the final episode to avoid spoilers. This device evokes the veteran interviews of Medal of Honor and some of the early Call of Duty games, and arguably is one of those things you really could only get away with at the turn of the millennium. Aside from the fact that the people in those interviews are all gone now, we live in an age of serious disconnect with history. These veterans were living history; as long as they were alive, they were living memory. And now those memories are just words in a textbook.
If you've seen Saving Private Ryan, you have a pretty good idea of what to expect from Band of Brothers. The core of the show is the bonds between the characters, but they will go through hell. Don't get too attached to your favorite character, because chances are good he'll either die, or, if he's lucky, get wounded and sent home. As befits an HBO show, Band of Brothers isn't afraid to get gory. And yet it maintains a romanticism that I think defined a lot of World War II stuff (especially films and games) released between 1994 (the 50th anniversary of the D-Day landings) and 2007 (the year Call of Duty dropped World War II as a theme and went modern-day.) That romanticism I think reflects the nature of the story: it's a story being told by the men who were there, but they had each other to lean on.
No such romanticism exists in The Pacific. Produced nearly a decade after Band of Brothers, again for HBO, The Pacific is presented as a companion piece of sorts to the previous series, this time set in the Pacific theater of operations. Based mostly on the memoirs of a couple of the men who were there, The Pacific eschews the ensemble cast model to narrowly focus on three men, who were all in different regiments of the United States' 1st Marine Division; thus, rather than one story of multiple intertwining threads, we get three stories that come and go as the war grinds on.
These three characters are PFC Robert Leckie, Corporal Eugene Sledge, and Gunnery Sergeant John Basilone. We follow them from the first days landing in Guadalcanal to the hell on earth that was Iwo Jima and Okinawa, before finally going home. Basilone gets the least attention, largely because he spends much of the war doing bonds tours before rejoining the fight, only to die on Iwo Jima. So the show is largely either Leckie's or Sledge's, and while both storylines have somewhat different tones, they both show rather graphically what PTSD does to a person.
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| The Pacific |
Because that's what makes The Pacific really stand out: it is one of the most mean-spirited shows I've ever seen. While the European theater was no picnic, especially on the Eastern Front, it's no secret that the Pacific theater was a meatgrinder, a maelstrom of incredible violence as two massive empires, maddened by mutual hatred, crashed into each other, leaving the Pacific awash in blood and smoke. This grim reality is reflected in the show's tone. It's significantly gorier than either of its companion shows, culminating in an incredibly grim scene in which Sledge hears a small splashing noise, and turns around to see his fellow marine Merriell "Snafu" Shelton (a cynically amoral figure who nonetheless looks out for Sledge) throwing pebbles into the ruined skull of a dead Japanese soldier. The scene is made all the more surreal when Sledge, increasingly hardened by all he has experienced, goes to pull the gold teeth off another corpse, like he had seen other marines too (sometimes on someone who was alive) only for Snafu to warn him off, making up some excuse about disease to cover for the fact that he doesn't want to see Sledge go down the same road he did.
Really, the last half of the show is Sledge's; while Leckie's journey through trauma, including a stint in a Marine mental health facility, defines the tone of the first half, Sledge burns with an unending hatred for the enemy, going from a naive, idealistic young boy to a baby-faced killer teetering on the edge of total moral ruin. And that, I think, is the most defining characteristic of The Pacific: a cavalcade of horrors, a re-enactment of an enormous experiment to discover just how far men can be pushed into barbarity. A little bit of levity early on (such as a scene of disheveled marines just barely holding themselves up at reveille after a night on the town) simply cannot be a bulkwark for the nightmare to follow.
Which is probably why Masters of the Air takes a different tack entirely. Produced in 2021 for Apple TV+ this time, Masters of the Air features the airmen of the 100th Bomb Group, a bomber unit in the United States Army's Eighth Air Force in Europe. The men in the B-17s aren't boots on the ground, they're officers, flying great machines to rain death upon the enemy. The distance between the bombers and their targets creates a kind of detachment, but the 100th is no stranger to casualties; their policy of performing missions in the daytime exposes them to tremendous danger from flak and German fighter planes, and all too many of their planes don't come back. And should they survive being shot down, they're landing in hostile territory.
Like the other shows, Masters of the Air focuses on a few different people, with the majority of it centering around four individuals: Major Gale "Buck" Cleven, Major John "Bucky" Egan (yes, similar nicknames, and yes they acknowledge it), Lieutenant Harry Crosby, and Major Robert "Rosie" Rosenthal. A big part of the show is the bromance between Cleven and Egan, a bond that sets the tone for the final third of the series. Much of the story however is narrated by Crosby, whose memoir forms the basis for most of the show.
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| Masters of the Air |
You can also tell this show was written in the era of Trump, unlike its predecessors. A lot more is made about the evil of Nazi Germany, with more focus on the brutality of the regime. Like Band of Brothers, there is a sequence in a death camp, but rather than showing its liberation by heroic American soldiers, the series' final episode has a single American pilot, Rosie, journeying with the Soviets on their way to put him on a plane back to England, when he wanders into an abandoned camp and finds the remains of its prisoners. His Soviet minder explains that they've been finding camps like this all over Europe. Little wonder, then, that his attitude towards the war, already uncompromising, takes on a harder edge: when talking to Crosby later about the spiritual and moral dangers of waging war and the ethics of indiscriminate bombing, Crosby cites that Nietzsche quote about fighting monsters, to which Rosie, who you might have guessed by his surname is Jewish, replies with what may be the ultimate message of the episode, if not the series: "[Fighting the monsters] has made us do some tough things, but we had to. The things these people are capable of... no, they got it coming."
Perhaps that speaks to a very American view of the world, adopted by a franchise that, in its 25-year-existence, has focused entirely on the American experience in the war. Perhaps it's unfair to tar an entire country with the same Nazi brush in a show produced nearly a century after the war it depicts. Perhaps. But I think we need to stop kidding ourselves; as Trump's America spirals ever deeper into its own moral ruin, it's refreshing to see that kind of clarity, of absolute certainty that what is happening is wrong and must be defeated — nay, destroyed — at all costs. It's a Why We Fight for the modern era.
Masters of the Air isn't perfect. With just nine episodes compared to its predecessors' ten each, it was obviously cut a little short by the pandemic. Episode 8 in particular is a bit of a mess, cramming a bunch of stuff into a short runtime, which has the side effect of introducing a number of characters from the Tuskegee Airmen almost at the last minute and not giving them enough screentime (once again they get screwed over, though it's still better than Red Tails, which is an insult on their memory.) But while it sometimes tries to replicate the romanticism of Band of Brothers, it eventually gives up on that for the sake of a refreshing frankness. I wish it had been given a little more time to breathe, but it nevertheless may be my favorite of the three series.
Watching all three series back to back has been an interesting ride. In a way, it's a bit like watching an adaptation of one of the classic Call of Duty games with their multiple perspectives. But it's also a bit of a reflection of how the modern day sees World War II, given the nine or ten-year gaps between series: the romanticism of pre-9/11 America, to a bitter post-Iraq cynicism, and finally to a Trump-era defiance and clear-eyed conviction. You might have your own opinions on which one is best, but ultimately, all three shows have different things to say, and different ways to say them; collectively speaking, they're some of the best wartime dramas ever made.