Masters of the Air: how Band of Brothers shaped the future of television

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It’s 9 September 2001. A younger historical past buff known as Tom is sitting down to observe the huge new HBO collection, Band of Brothers. Like many Americans, Tom’s household don’t have an HBO subscription, and so he’s needed to go over to his next-door neighbours, Earl and Doris. “I looked forward to it for a long time,” he says, “but wasn’t prepared for how great it was”. He was in apposite firm: Earl had been at Omaha Beach on D-Day. He had met Doris in England, the place she had endured the blitz, and married her earlier than taking her again to the United States. And now, some 50 years later, Earl, Doris and Tom had been sitting collectively, watching the most formidable televisual illustration of America’s function in the Second World War ever dedicated to the display – simply two days earlier than America’s place in the world order would shift as soon as once more.

Band of Brothers, a 10-part depiction of the journey of a parachute regiment – Easy Company – throughout the Western Front and in direction of Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest outpost, was a landmark second in television historical past. It shaped the first half of a triptych American participation in the Second World War. Band of Brothers informed the story of squaddies deployed throughout Europe, whereas, virtually 10 years later, the present’s creators reunited for The Pacific, a vivid retelling of naval warfare in the Eastern theatre. Now, with one other decade in the rearview mirror, the air power is having its time in the solar, with Masters of the Air beginning this week on Apple TV+. This unfastened trilogy of reveals, which depict the three major branches of the US Army, had been all produced by the powerhouse Hollywood duo of Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, with key collaborators together with Gary Goetzman and John Orloff binding collectively a singular imaginative and prescient of American army historical past.

Back in 2001, Band of Brothers represented an enormous punt on public curiosity in a warfare fought inside residing reminiscence. A New York Times article, shortly earlier than the present’s launch, proclaimed “HBO Bets Pentagon-Style Budget on a World War II Saga”. The mooted determine of $125m for the collection – or $12m an episode – was eye-watering, even by the requirements of status TV.

“In HBO’s early days,” says Felix Gillette, co-author of It’s Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution and Future of HBO, “all of its original programmes were made on threadbare budgets.” The daybreak of DVD gross sales in the mid-Nineties modified all that, with new income streams opening up alternatives for television to problem the visible supremacy of cinema. “Band of Brothers was the epitome of this new approach,” judges Gillette.

But earlier than it may very well be a landmark piece of enterprise, altering the premium panorama endlessly, it needed to be a coherent piece of narrative. The present, which follows Damian Lewis’s Dick Winters via the final years of the warfare, was conceived by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks off the again of their 1998 Oscar-winning hit, Saving Private Ryan. That film – starring Hanks as a Captain affected by PTSD as he searches for a younger personal performed by Matt Damon – opens in the shell-stirred waters of Omaha seashore. That sequence, the place touchdown craft arrive in Normandy to a hail of German gunfire, was celebrated as one of the most visceral and real looking depictions of the horror of warfare. Roger Ebert known as it “as graphic as any war footage I’ve ever seen”. One of the present’s writers, Erik Bork, says that the collection was simple “to make primal and compelling because of the constant battle and life-and-death stakes”.

The vital success of this brutal opening would form the aesthetic sensibility of Band of Brothers, which continues in that nightmarish vein. Death, when it comes, is usually swift and sudden. But generally it’s chaotic and protracted, as when the parachutists arrive in France solely to have machine weapons flip their canopies into ribbons. “We read a lot of books and see movies where it’s the gallant general coming in with the bird’s eye view,” observes Marcus Brotherton, a author who labored with veterans of Easy Company on a collective memoir, A Company of Heroes. “But the war is led by the non-commissioned officers and the war is won or lost on the success of the guy who’s got the rifle in his hands.”

Working with veterans of the battle, Brotherton had a novel alternative to establish their sense of the authenticity of the drama. Did it seize their expertise? Or costume it up as Hollywood cosplay? “The men talked about how the battle scenes were very vivid, realistic, and brought back memories. Many of those memories were traumatic but overall, they were pretty happy with the series.” That’s a view corroborated by Joe Muccia, an Iraq warfare veteran and historian of Easy Company. “Viewers could view these veterans as if they were someone we knew,” he says. “It provided that kind of connection.”

“Tom Hanks was such a believer in verisimilitude carrying the day if done right,” says Bork, who co-wrote the finale episode set deep in Nazi Germany. “The real events were so rich and compelling already that verisimilitude would always win.” For Bork, the course of of writing for one of the greatest reveals ever dedicated to the small display was intimately certain up in telling the actual tales of life in Easy Company. “We would sometimes modify and shape how events and characters were presented for practical reasons or for clarity, but never to make it ‘more exciting’,” he says. “More understandable, maybe, or more personal and emotional, but never: ‘This isn’t exciting enough on its own.’”

Part of that excitement comes from a sense of momentum that builds through the show, from D-Day in 1944 to VE Day less than a year later. This small slice of history is the story of America’s warfare. Action opens in 1942, after the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor, and so the drama begins in media res. When the males of Easy Company arrive in continental Europe, they discover it a wartorn husk: the land is already pock-marked from years of mortar fireplace, the folks ready for star-spangled liberation.

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The BBC, who contributed an unprecedented £7m to co-produce the drama, grew to become skittish about the present and, in a outstanding volte-face, moved it from BBC One to BBC Two only a few weeks earlier than it was resulting from air. “It’s not too gory,” remarked Lorraine Heggessey, then the controller of BBC One, “but it’s relatively niche and I’m running a mainstream channel.”

In hindsight, the BBC’s chilly toes seems like a failure of artistic and industrial creativeness. “The relationship that men of my generation have with Band of Brothers is amazing,” says Robert Hutton, a British creator and co-host of A Pod Too Far, who will likely be 50 this yr. The present, for him, is instructive about “what it is to be a man, to be a leader, to be a comrade”. And whereas it was inspiring a cohort of younger males to be extra accountable (and begin warfare film rewatch podcasts), it was additionally launching the careers of a number of future family names: Simon Pegg, Tom Hardy, Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Graham, Andrew Scott, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender. All seem, fleetingly, as half of Band of Brothers’ sprawling ensemble. As a feat of speculative casting, it shows an funding judgment that may make a Rockefeller jealous.

The solid of Masters of the Air, in the meantime, presumably displays how bankable the proposition has grow to be. Among its leads, each Austin Butler and Barry Keoghan had been Oscar-nominated final yr; Ncuti Gatwa and Callum Turner, in the meantime, have already graced the big-time worlds of Doctor Who and Harry Potter.

Watch Band of Brothers now, greater than twenty years later, and the present is an apparent blueprint for HBO’s success. Their hit reveals from the pre-Band of Brothers period – The Sopranos, which was two years into its eight-year run, and Six Feet Under, which premiered a couple of months earlier than Spielberg’s miniseries – really feel much less emblematic of HBO’s future success than the Spielberg/Hanks opus. “The real legacy of Band of Brothers at HBO,” says James Andrew Miller, creator of Tinderbox: HBO’s Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers, “wasn’t solely reflected in its appetite for miniseries, but rather its comfort with taking big chances that required writing big cheques.” For Miller, Rome, Westworld and, most strikingly, Game of Thrones are all descended from Band of Brothers. “You can draw a direct line from Band of Brothers to these later ambitions,” he says.

And but, maybe as a result of of its Americanness, or the proximity of its launch to the 11 September assaults and altering social mores about the army, Band of Brothers feels, at occasions, like a forgotten chapter in fashionable televisual historical past. Some of the qualities of the present identified by veteran Muccia – “it stresses service to your nation and faith in your comrades… there is a purity and goodness in that” – already feels old school. Recent critically acclaimed warfare motion pictures, equivalent to All Quiet on the Western Front or Dunkirk, or extra fashionable choices like Zero Dark Thirty or The Hurt Locker, have traded extra instantly in ethical ambivalence. And even lengthy earlier than Band of Brothers, “war movies in the 1980s were about Vietnam, and full of complexity about why the troops were there”, says Hutton. In distinction, Spielberg’s Second World War dramas, each Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers, are basic “mission” tales. If warfare is hell, then Easy Company is Orpheus descending into the underworld, on a tragic quest the place there is just one route of journey.

But looking back, as Orpheus shouldn’t have, the lack of a politicised angle to Band of Brothers provides it a timeless high quality. Unlike Top Gun or American Sniper, there may be no insinuation that it’s recruitment propaganda for the US army. But, equally, it’s no Platoon or The Thin Red Line; there isn’t any route for it to be learn as an anti-war diatribe. Released 60 years on from the Pearl Harbor assault (and shortly after the Michael Bay movie of the similar title disgraced cinema screens), Band of Brothers was a possibility to relearn the experiences of a technology of veterans, of their twilight years.

“I hope that we can continue to educate this generation and future generations,” says Brotherton, whose oral histories of Easy Company had been one of the final alternatives for that regiment to inform their tales instantly. Now, 80 years after D-Day, there are few who stay to inform the story of the liberation of France, Europe and the survival, for now, of Western democracy.

It is straightforward to see the America of early September 2001, when the present debuted, as a prelapsarian paradise of naive bliss. Two days later, 9/11 would exchange Pearl Harbor as the deadliest assault ever dedicated on American soil. And but, in case you take a look at Tom, Earl and Doris huddled round a single HBO subscription, watching that opening episode, the fantasy of innocence evaporates. Earl and Doris had been there, not in itchy reproduction costumes and muddy make-up, however in the thrust of the narrative. For veterans and new viewers and executives at HBO shaping the future of television, Band of Brothers supplied a definitive bookend to a tumultuous century – and have become the last draft of a residing, respiratory historical past.

‘Masters of the Air’ is out on Apple TV+ on Friday 26 January