Band Of Brothers is still pretty tough to beat. Coming out in 2001, sandwiched between The Sopranos and The Wire, it helped usher in the ‘Golden Age Of TV‘ with a 10-hour WWII epic that made Saving Private Ryan look like a trailer. If that wasn’t enough, it was the launchpad for a dozen careers, including Damian Lewis, Tom Hardy, Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy. The Pacific followed in 2010 (enter Jon Bernthal and Rami Malek) and now, finally, we have the follow-up, this time centred around the bomber crews of the American Air Force.
Just as worthy, twice as expensive, and equally full of all-tomorrow’s A-listers, Masters Of The Air is another essential slice of old-school prestige television that completes Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks’ blockbuster boxset trilogy with serious style and violence.
Not that you can tell who the hell anyone is for the first couple of hours. Half-hidden behind full-face masks in the cramped cockpits of identical B-17 bombers, all dressed the same, it’s only the most distinctive eyebrows that stand out at first. For the most part, that’s Austin Butler, Callum Turner and Barry Keoghan – the pilots in command of the American crews stationed in Suffolk that spent their war running increasingly dangerous bombing raids over northern Europe between 1942 and 1945.
These are the men of “The Bloody Hundredth”, earning their grim nickname after taking some of the worst aerial casualties of the war – shown here as young, cocky, terrified kids forced to squeeze into a thin metal tube and drift slowly over Germany while a million guns ripped them to shreds from below. Where Band Of Brothers and The Pacific started their episodes on emotional interviews with the real veterans involved, Masters Of The Air sadly arrives too late for many of them to be left alive, not that most made it out of the war in the first place.
By episode three, the show looks like a meat grinder. By episode nine, it’s hard to leave the series behind without a profound sense of respect for the nightmare endured by a whole generation. Prisoner of war stories, escape stories, romance stories and stories of extraordinary kinship and courage and trauma overfill nine hours with sharp, fierce drama as Masters Of The Air gradually moves out of the cockpit and onto the ground, but it never strays far from a deep sense of responsibility to history.
Director Cary Fukunaga (No Time To Die) and creators John Shiban and John Orloff set the tone from the first few episodes but the misty-eyed, cinematic sheen comes straight from producer Steven Spielberg, bathing every hero shot in holy light – and lending the extraordinary aerial action scenes the kind of weight (and budget) that wins Oscars. But maybe it’s the casting director who deserves the credit here, assembling what feels like the class of ’24 in Butler (bleeding movie-star charisma in every frame), Turner and Keoghan, plus rising stars Darragh Cowley, Anthony Boyle, Branden Cook, Nate Mann and more.
When Band Of Brothers first came out, it was the kind of show that sold new television sets. Two decades later, Masters Of The Air is only selling Apple TV+ subscriptions, but it feels like no less of an event. This kind of thing doesn’t come around too often.
‘Masters Of The Air’ streams on Apple TV+ from January 26