There are war dramas, and then there is Band of Brothers. (pause for reveille!!) for Even now, more than two decades after it first aired, HBO’s ten-part account of Easy Company feels unusually immediate. Mud sticks to everything, artillery lands with horrible force, men disappear from the story without ceremony and victories rarely arrive without somebody paying for them.
Based on the real experiences of Easy Company, 506th Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division, the series follows the men from their training at Camp Toccoa through D-Day, Operation Market Garden, Bastogne and eventually into Germany. That journey gives Band of Brothers its scale, but the reason it works is much smaller. We spend enough time with these men that a face in the corner of a transport truck eventually means something.
Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg arrived at the project after Saving Private Ryan, and you can certainly see that film’s influence. The washed-out photography, handheld movement and refusal to make combat look remotely comfortable carry across, but television gives the story room that a feature film never could. One episode can concentrate on an assault, another on exhaustion, another on somebody simply trying to hold themselves together.
The production still looks expensive because the money is on the screen rather than being announced by it. Uniforms get dirtier. Faces become thinner. Villages look occupied rather than decorated. Bastogne is miserably cold before anyone even mentions the temperature. The sound is particularly effective. Gunfire is sharp and ugly, artillery has weight, and periods of relative quiet can become more uncomfortable than the battle scenes because you know the next shell is eventually coming.
Easy Company is the reason it lasts
Damian Lewis gives Richard Winters exactly the sort of presence the role needs. He is calm without becoming superhuman, capable without being written as the man who always has the perfect answer. Winters earns authority gradually, and Lewis understands that he does not need to announce it every time he enters a scene.
Ron Livingston’s Nixon gives him an excellent counterweight. Nixon is clever, cynical, increasingly dependent on alcohol and often exhausted by the whole business. Their friendship provides some of the series’ best quieter moments because neither character needs to explain it.
Then there is David Schwimmer as Captain Sobel. For anybody arriving from Friends, the first few minutes can produce a strange bit of mental recalibration. Ross Geller has apparently joined the 101st Airborne and he is furious with everybody. That recognition soon disappears because Schwimmer makes Sobel genuinely unpleasant without reducing him to a cartoon. He is an effective training officer in some respects and completely wrong for combat leadership in others. The contradiction makes him far more interesting than simply making him the bloke everyone hates.
The cast around them is enormous. Donnie Wahlberg, Scott Grimes and Neal McDonough become familiar faces, while future stars such as Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy turn up before most viewers knew who they were. On a rewatch there is a mild game of spotting actors before they became famous, but the ensemble never feels built around cameos. They are soldiers first.
That huge cast can occasionally work against the series. Especially early on, several of the less prominent men blur together, and it can take time before names and faces settle into place. Band of Brothers almost demands that attention, though, because eventually somebody who seemed peripheral in episode two becomes important in episode six.
The interviews with the real Easy Company veterans at the beginning of each episode change the tone completely. Initially they are unidentified older men recalling events. By the end, when the series finally tells us who they are, those fragments click into place. The drama has spent ten episodes turning history into recognisable people, then quietly hands the story back to the men who lived it.
Few episodes demonstrate the series’ restraint better than Why We Fight. When Easy Company encounters a concentration camp, the programme does not need a speech explaining the horror. The soldiers’ reactions do the work. Confusion gives way to comprehension, and the scale of what they are seeing becomes almost impossible to process. It remains one of the hardest episodes to watch, precisely because the series does not try to make the moment grander than it already is.
Band of Brothers is not relentlessly fast. Some episodes deliberately slow down, and viewers expecting ten hours of Saving Private Ryan beach assaults may be surprised by how much time is spent waiting, freezing, talking, drinking, walking and wondering what happens next. That is part of the point. War is not presented as an uninterrupted montage of heroics.
There is courage throughout the series, but plenty of fear, incompetence, exhaustion and chance as well. Good officers make mistakes. Bad officers occasionally do something useful. Men survive things that kill the person beside them. The series respects Easy Company without turning every member of it into a statue.
The Pacific and Masters of the Air would later revisit this style of large-scale wartime television, but Band of Brothers remains the one we return to most readily. Perhaps it is the people. Perhaps it is the ten-episode structure. Perhaps it is simply that everything came together at exactly the right moment.
Whatever the reason, an 8/10 still feels right. Band of Brothers is huge television built around very human details, and Easy Company stays with you long after the shooting stops.
