100 Favorite Shows: #70 — Band of Brothers
“It’s been two years since I’ve seen home.”
By the time Band of Brothers bowed on HBO in 2001 just two days before 9/11, miniseries were to be expected on television. Yet, nothing about the turns of actors like LeVar Burton or Patrick Swayze on miniseries could have prepared viewers for Band of Brothers, which took the limited series format to the next level and then some. Created by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, two of Hollywood’s biggest heavyweights, Band of Brothers grounded itself in World War II with the true stories of the “Easy” Company — from training to homecoming. And when it came time for the Emmys, there had never been a steamroller like Band of Brothers, a juggernaut on all fronts, especially the western one.
(Again, it’s hard to spoil real life. But if you’re sensitive to that sort of thing, especially as it pertains to Band of Brothers, then this essay is not the one for you.)
In my tenth grade history classroom, there was a massive Band of Brothers poster plastered on the back wall. I’d never heard of it before so when I considered the huge font that Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg’s names were in, I believed it to be a movie. Evidence of Band of Brothers’ miniseries status was first made apparent to me when I, trusting my teacher’s taste, added it to my watchlist and noticed it was 594 minutes long. More than simply being a war miniseries, Band of Brothers was a miniseries from the time when it was prestigious to produce a ten-episode limited series about a particular moment in history, rather than the norm.
About a year or so later, I finally made the time for it. (What a luxury that I, at that age, had to find the time for Band of Brothers rather than be shipped off to one of the only justifiable wars ever fought.) What I saw just floored me. It was harrowing and painful for the most part, but it also created grandiose moments that made the horrors worth it. That’s kind of how I see war. There’s way more horror than glory, if there’s any glory at all. But when you genuinely liberate and you genuinely make the world a better place, it’s not that the horrors are worth it. Rather, it’s the feeling of, “Well. At least it wasn’t for nothing.” For the most part, though, war does tend to be for nothing.
Granted, few wars ever have a happy ending, but World War II at least saw good triumph over evil thanks to what has since been referred to as “the greatest generation.” If Band of Brothers had come out in 2020, the “greatest generation” concept would’ve come with an asterisk. Instead, it came out at the perfect time: the zenith of 21st century patriotism and hot button dogma. It became a celebration of many soldiers who were in the third act of their lives. And by telling their story over the course of ten thorough episodes of HBO greatness, it put Band of Brothers on the pedestal of one of the most tremendous, most true-to-life war stories ever told on screen. And Hanks and Spielberg did it just three years after Saving Private Ryan! It’s truly devotion to a theme that we won’t see again.
(Only The Pacific ever tried to live up to Band of Brothers. No one else has dared to touch the war miniseries format in the way Brothers did. No one else had ever tried to do it before Brothers either. Sure, there was M*A*S*H, but that was occupying a completely different lane. The closest comparison might be From the Earth to the Moon. What that show was to Band of Brothers is what The Larry Sanders Show was to The Sopranos. Earth and Sanders changed television forever, but Brothers and Sopranos are the ones that usually get the credit.)
Beginning Band of Brothers, I knew I was in safe hands instantly. With Hanks and Spielberg at the helm and a Henry V reference in the title, I could give myself over to the story and trust that the end result would be immensely satisfying. Furthermore, I was appeased when I learned the company the audience was slated to follow throughout the show was given the shorthand name, “Easy” Company. My biggest problems with war stories had always been that I couldn’t keep track of company names or infantry numbers or any of that mumbo jumbo. The only one I actually retained was the 4077th on M*A*S*H because they referenced it about 3,000 times. I couldn’t even begin to tell you another number of an army unit. (God only knows if I’m using the proper nomenclature.)
But I knew Easy! I felt like I understood Easy and like I was safe with them. As such, I was able to slip into the group of soldiers like I was one of them. Filled with a minor league farm system of the century’s next great (but not yet famous) acting talents, Easy felt incredibly real. All of the actors authentically inhabited their characters and allowed for them to rise above the crowds of helmets and haircuts (though, the makeup and costuming departments on the show were batting 1.000) to become genuinely recognizable and individualistic.
Of course, I have to mention the two characters who have gotten the most flak over the years as being distinctly non-chameleon. That would be David Schwimmer’s Captain Sobel and Jimmy Fallon’s George Rice. For Schwimmer, it’s hard to fully buy him as an enraging hard-ass, but I think if Ross Geller never existed, it would’ve been much easier to grasp. This is hardly Schwimmer’s fault.
As for Fallon, I like his role. I know I’m biased because I’ve always been a Fallon fan (my friend, Caleb, has a strong dislike for him and his cameo in Band of Brothers), but his role is honestly so small that you have to be really sensitive to think that his appearance disrupted the overall arc of the show. Besides, Fallon’s role as Rice is to show up when Easy is pushed to the brink in terms of how much ammo they’re lacking. When Rice shows up with a load of it, it’s one of the show’s few injections of relief. They got the ammo! And look who brought it: Jimmy Fallon! Things are happy now! That’s how I felt about it anyway. I appreciated that the show doubled down on the levity, if only for a moment.
The two characters who obviously rise above Easy and become the focal points of many episodes are Dick Winters (Damian Lewis) and Lewis Nixon (Ron Livingston). (I have no memory of what their military titles are and I felt like Googling them would be betraying my aforementioned admission that I have no knowledge of any war-based vocabulary.)
Winters is a character who grapples with the concept of ambition and when it should be stopped. He’s clearly a brilliant man who’s consistently deft at what he’s asked to do. But in “Crossroads” (an episode directed by Hanks, who joined the talents of people like David Nutter and David Frankel behind the camera), we see Winters promoted away from the battle lines and the most in-the-moment strategy zones. It’s a sliding doors moment for him that results in some inner turmoil. It’s not that Winters hasn’t earned it, but rather that he wasn’t ready for it.
“Crossroads” is largely a transitional episode (Easy travels from Holland to the Battle of the Bulge) that hinges on a couple flashbacks for much of the main action. (Don’t worry, war nuts; there’s still a compelling action sequence; it just doesn’t serve as the climax of “Crossroads.”) Yet, the installment is still crucial for understanding Winters’ character. (I love the slow ordering of the chess pieces into where they need to be for a subsequent pay-off episode, personally.) At night, he’s all alone in an unfamiliar city. He’s got no friends, no Easy, no Nixon. Winters can handle the new job, but the best use of his talents is where the action’s actually happening. That’s where his knack for war (if there is such a thing) can shine the most. We see him charging into battle all by himself for the good of the rest of Easy. A man like that can’t be placed behind a desk. Not when the world’s at stake. Sometimes, promotions aren’t meant to usurp a ceiling.
It’s also tragic that a man as young as Winters is in the show has to be asked to do one or the other. We see the weight of the war burrow deeper into Nixon than it does Winter, but the truth is it causes damage for everyone in Easy. A deep thinker and soulful friend, Nixon is what happens when Jiminy Cricket becomes a drunk (it’s often hard to tell if Nixon’s canteen contains water, alcohol, or his own urine) who fought in a war for so long that he forgot how it started. It’s tragic to see it eat away at the youthful spirit of Nixon over the course of the show, but it’s also tragic to see Buck Compton (Neal McDonough) return to Easy in “Crossroads” with no visual explanation as to why his cocky swagger is now completely gone from his persona. Do you want to see someone get broken gradually or all at once? Band of Brothers depicted both and either way, the outcome was tragic.
“Why We Fight,” the show’s penultimate installment is largely a vehicle for better understanding Nixon’s character, but ultimately, the episode shows us dozens of men losing their innocence all at once. At the outset, Nixon suffers a breakdown over why he’s been fighting in that endless, godforsaken war for years. But suddenly, Easy arrives at the concentration camp and it hits Nixon and all of them in an instantaneous typhoon of horror. This is why they’re fighting.
In “Why We Fight,” Band of Brothers was at its most chilling, but it was also at its most memorable. Even on the rewatch, the wind was sucked out of my body when they actually stumble across one of the abandoned concentration camps in Germany. It’s devastating; it just shatters them. The battles, the lyrics to “Blood on the Risers,” the mutilation. These were all harrowing Band of Brothers moments, but none of them compare to the shock of the camp. The tragedy of the Holocaust is always palpable and it was made even more so by the astonishing likeness with which the series recreated one of the hamlets of it. Obviously, this depiction is by design to make the viewer uncomfortable (it should), but that doesn’t mean it gets any easier to watch in subsequent takes. There’s the old adage “war is hell,” but this was bigger than war. Hell just kept coming.
In their moment of discovery, no one cracks a smile or a joke like they’d done over the course of the show so far. No one even thinks to do so. Instead, many in Easy can’t do anything but stare. We see Webster (Eion Bailey) verbally eviscerating local Germans because his anger needs to go somewhere. Liebgott (Ross McCall in the show’s best performance), Easy’s Jewish soldier, has a complete emotional breakdown when he has to deny the survivors food and freedom from the camps. It’s for their own good, but the thought of it is insurmountable. Something like that should never be asked of a young kid who’s in way over his head in the war.
For us, it’s easy to take for granted that the Holocaust happened. We’ll never forget its horrors, but we take it at face value as a part of history. For these soldiers, though, this was completely new — and beyond anything their nightmares could have concocted. They’re all just kids. What can they even think to do in a moment like that? There’s no procedure for the worst thing that ever happened on the planet. The fact that they can even walk is testament enough to their bravery and their liberation. Band of Brothers displayed every flicker of doubt and shame and permanent trauma.
The segments at the concentration camp are undeniably the most memorable images from the show. At the same time, though, they call into question the introduction of “Why We Fight.” The Band of Brothers installments began with interviews from real WWII veterans as they reflected on the war. In this episode, many of the real soldiers remarked about how, under different circumstances, they would have been friends with the soldiers in the German army, but they were forced to be enemies by the higher powers.
I’m not so sure of this. Yes, the Christmas Truce is one of the best stories ever told, but that has so far proven itself to be the exception in war. It’s hard to think that anyone who fought for the Nazi cause — even if they were forced into it — would be able to be friends with the soldiers from the U.S., U.K., Russia, etc. Their differences were fundamental beliefs about human rights and human lives. Watching trauma compound between Holocaust victims and survivors and WWII soldiers is vastly more severe than anyone involved could have imagined when they were building lives in Poland or in a boot camp across the sea (even though we knew the horrors in store for both). The nature of it is unfathomable and it’s forgiving a lot of nuance to think that the German soldiers were just “doing their job.” In fact, the nature of the war makes sitting behind a desk or being an alcoholic seem more tolerable. But on Band of Brothers, none of it was ever easy.
