Steven Spielberg’s Long-Awaited Follow-up to Band of Brothers Is Not Just for War Nerds

In the rattling, chilly insides of a B-17 bomber, 10 men undertake a mission I’d never accept: They must pilot through a sky full of anti-aircraft flak, past harrying enemy fighter planes; they must freeze in the upper atmosphere, breathing through leather oxygen masks; they must mentally absorb the inevitable hits to the airplane and the terrible injuries to the men inside, then adjust their tactics to compensate for the loss of those airplane parts and men; they must make the (pen-and-paper!) calculations necessary to locate the target, drop the bombs, and then get the hell back to base—or else bail out, into occupied territory.

This is highly dramatic stuff. Masters of the Air, the Apple TV+ show that drops a two-part premiere on Friday, knows it, and makes the most of it. The miniseries stars Austin Butler, Callum Turner, and Barry Keoghan as airmen of the “Bloody 100^th,” a group in the American Eighth Air Force Division that became famous during World War II for incurring heavy losses in the course of its involvement in the war, as well as for its airmen’s colorful personalities. The show has been in the works since 2013, developed by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, who also made Band of Brothers (2001) and The Pacific (2010) for HBO. When it was announced pre-pandemic, the series was set to be Apple’s first in-house production; with its $250 million budget and buzzy cast, Masters of the Air still represents a big bet for the streamer, even if it’s arriving slightly later than expected.

Watching this beautifully produced, highly detailed show is like visiting a history museum with an older relative who’s trying to get you interested in a time period they love. You’re grabbed by the elbow: Can you believe how many planes were lost over Germany in just one week? Imagine being fed such a lavish breakfast before you had to go on these missions! Isn’t it crazy that pilots at that time had to rely on their crews’ human eyes to assess their situation while they were in the air? These guys called their planes (also known as “Flying Fortresses”) their “forts”! If you didn’t know these things, Masters of the Air will tell you.

This intensive immersion in the details was what watching Band of Brothers was like, too. But the dominant vibe of watching Band of Brothers was different: It was, like its subject “Easy” Company’s experience of the war, a long, arduous trial of endurance. The most memorable episode of that series was about a month Easy spent, undersupplied and freezing, near Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge. Episode 6 follows company medic Eugene Roe (Shane Taylor) as he scurries around the snowy forest and tends to injured man after injured man, slowly losing his grip on sanity. A Belgian nurse he befriends near the beginning of the hour gets killed in a bombardment near the end. It’s a grind, and not one with many redeeming moments.

Yes, Band of Brothers and its follow-up, The Pacific, have their rabid fans—the Band of Brothers subreddit has been waiting for Masters of the Air for years. But Masters of the Air has a different rhythm, and one that may be more conducive to the development of a broader audience. The 100^th was stationed at a base—Thorpe Abbotts, in East Anglia—where, with a lot of time in between runs, the airmen are eating, hanging out, drinking, and waiting. They go on leave and meet women in bars, and there are even a few sex scenes. All this brotherly conviviality is punctuated by the bombing runs: action sequences that chatter your teeth, make you near-sick with constant motion and noise, and horrify you with blood and fire. (The production created two B-17 replicas for its exterior shots, then filmed close-ups of the actors inside sections replicating the interior parts of the plane; sometimes those actors look like they’re being rattled around like frogs in a coffee can.)

Also working to the show’s benefit, when it comes to reaching an audience outside of war nerds, are the key figures of Masters of the Air, who were, historically speaking, colorful and charismatic. Band of Brothers seemed to aim for a bit more anonymity in its characters, who tend to run together. Back in 2001, when Band of Brothers came out, its lead, Damian Lewis, was not yet Homeland or Billions Damian Lewis—just a redheaded Brit who turned out to be really good at playing Americans. His Dick Winters, a teetotaling Pennsylvanian and surefooted leader who always knows what to do, becomes a stable, unwavering point of focus for the viewer. When Winters takes control of a situation, like the men under his command, you relax a little. Winters’ stolid implacability paired well with the character’s more volatile, often-drunk best friend, the intelligence officer Lewis Nixon, played by Ron Livingston.

In Masters of the Air, we’re following Gale “Buck” Cleven (Butler), the steady one who’s loyal to his girl back home, and John “Bucky” Egan (Turner), the ebullient troublemaker who will hop up and sing along with the band, or take part in one of the aforementioned sex scenes. Austin Butler’s Elvis experience suits him well to play another handsome midcentury hero—of course Butler’s Cleven likes to chew on a toothpick while flying—even if it’s a bit distracting to have a known quantity in this role. Turner’s Egan—a mischievous, compelling amalgamation of mercury and flint—is, I think, going to make him a household name, if his recent role in George Clooney’s The Boys in the Boat hasn’t done so already.

Because the characters in all three of these World War II series are drawn from real life, a viewer concerned about feeling tense while watching this madness has options for self-spoiling. Getting attached to a character? You can just look up their name and see, on Wikipedia or the website of the American Air Museum, how their war went. You can relax, or, in some cases, you can prepare yourself for the inevitable. In Masters of the Air, for example, Barry Keoghan, whose bad-luck pilot Curtis Biddick always seems to get the worst of it, will die before the war is over. (This is not a spoiler! Sorry to Curtis Biddick!)

It’s this mix of stress and certainty that’s always made the Spielberg/Hanks World War II shows paradoxically palatable. All war movies inevitably become pro-war (so said Truffaut), but entertainment set in World War II has a shorter row to hoe. Masters of the Air is pretty sure all this death, among fliers and on the ground, was worth it—maybe even surer than the historical figures it depicts. (“You’ve got dirty work to do, you might as well face the facts …You’re going to be woman-killers and baby-killers,” the Bloody 100^th’s first commander said in late 1942.)

At one point in the series, a few minor characters wonder if they are doing the right thing before bombing the city center of Münster, targeting railroad workers’ houses and places of worship. But Egan—one of our two centers of gravity, as viewers—thinks the Americans have to “hit them where it hurts,” before every airman dies.

The final episodes of the series follow Robert “Rosie” Rosenthal (Nate Mann), a Jewish American pilot who became one of the most decorated of the war, as well as three Black fliers from the Tuskegee Airmen, as they are shot down behind enemy lines. The Tuskegee men end up at a POW camp in Germany, bunking with Buck and Bucky, and all of them cooperate across racial lines in order to survive. And as Rosie returns, hitching a ride with the Russians, he wanders through a concentration camp after it’s been evacuated, and interviews a Jewish survivor. “The things these people are capable of …” Rosie says to an airman who expresses doubts, in the final episode. “They got it coming.”

These last episodes are full of pride in American enterprise and open-mindedness—a throwback politics, a never-ending ode to the “Good War.” We get to see John Egan, who’s at a POW camp behind German lines when the tide of the war turns, replace the camp’s Nazi flag with an American one, then rest his head against the flagpole in thanks. And on their final run, to drop food over the starving Netherlands, the airmen see, outlined on the tulip fields, a message that serves as one last confirmation of their rightness: “Many Thanks, Yanks!” The American relationship to war has changed a lot since 1945. But inside the heads of Spielberg and Hanks, everything remains red, white, and blue.