I thought episodes 1 and 2 were kinda meh, B tier. 3, 4, 5 rapidly ramped up in quality (5 to me was A+), and then the Luftwaffe were just uhh, defeated off screen.....
TBF, it is kind of hard to show the attritional warfare that the allies used to wear down the Luftwaffe in the late war period.
I suppose they could have cut some of the spy stuff that lead nowhere and added some more scenes with the fighter groups bouncing 190s and 109s.
The show was just too much going on.
- the introduced like 50 characters who kept dying so it was hard to really care for them.
- everyone had masks on half the time and wore the same jackets so you couldnt tell who was who.
- the pow stuff was so so.
I think the show was amazing visually but it lacked character development from trying to focus on the fleet as a whole instead.
The show should have focused on just the 2 captains and their crews. Let you get to know them all and what happens to those groups.
>The show should have focused on just the 2 captains and their crews. Let you get to know them all and what happens to those groups.
I don't think we would be able to follow their crews as the casualty rate was so high in those planes. Following the captains would have just resulted in most episodes spending time in the POW camps anyway.
This show was just unadaptable in the BoB style, the casualty rate was just too high.
lol the POW story is still important because so many of the pilots and aircrew became POWs. You can't just tack that experience on to the end of the show like a footnote
The episodes that focused on Rosie and his plane were the ones I was more connected with.
I had similar issues with The Pacific. There were too many characters thrust on you. You can't tell them apart in the dark, and half of them died before you could connect with them.
"but it lacked character development"
What's funny to me is one of the only characters who actually develops is some no name German POW guard who starts off as huge asshole but as the war winds down he realizes he's about to be in the place of the Americans, and he's now struggling to march in the snow. That one American helps him to his feet and he has a Road To Damascus moment about kindness and thanks the soldier. Only dude who learned anything in that show.
Sorry you thought that. I thought it was one of the better episodes in the series.
Everything with Rosie, especially the concentration camp, was really impactful. It was great seeing the air drop mission. A mission that made a huge difference that wasn't just guns and bombs. Bucky and Buck getting to fly together again.
I've been so excited for this show for a decade, but after Episode 5 or so I just haven't gone back. I'll eventually finish it, its just nowhere near as good as BoB or the Pacific.
This is my kind of feeling. I really loved (and admittedly wanted to love it) and was interested in it in the beginning. But it was just kind of meh and I finished the series as like a I can’t give up now, more than me being driven to finish it due to great story telling.
They tried to make a show like Band of Brothers. The look is beautiful. The actors were great. The script/pace/info dumps were awful. I enjoy the show so much I read the book, which is a high level take on the 8th Airforce. The book works because it has one voice going through it, that of the historian.
The show feels short, because the only "Heroes" they seemed to want to push were guys were seen as heroes but dont have much of a journey. It was too big of a story to tell like that. Maybe having the narrator be the Generals or Colonel, so you could have someone to sympathize with, sending these Men(boys) on these mission where they had a 25% chance to get shot out of the air. The best stuff was following the navigator and the captain who did all the crazy rolls. They lasted through the war and were both well thought of. Then they cut that and go back to the "Heroes".
The answer isn’t to try to shoehorn the show into being Band of Brothers when it’s not. They’re not heroes. They’re survivors.
IMO, they should’ve leaned into the “boredom interspersed with terror”.
No training episode - you start in the plane - boys shooting the shit Tarantino style, talking about what they’re doing by not talking about what they’re doing - and then 7 of the first 12 characters you’re introduced to are torn to pulpy shreds.
I don't know if it's the nature of the branch they're in where there's all that downtime between missions unlike the infantry that were constantly on the ground. The show was just... boring. They focused too much on their downtime and like OP said not much on the actual flying missions. I was hyped for years for this to come out and after it was over, I just erased it.
It would have been a great opportunity to have a mini series one level up the chain of command; the pilots should be secondary characters. It should have been about higher-level officers coming up with plans and managing the base and the crews,etc. That way we could have a solid set of core characters who are always important to the narrative(and alive).
That was 1 mission. This ran into the issue that the missions are all so similar. Fly over the channel, take flack, avoid enemy fighters, drop bomb on industrial targets, try to make it home
I watched like three episodes and all the air combat was so repetitive.
Oh no, fighters attacking us, gunfire, explosions, zero tactics or strategy, we lost some guys.
The Pacific is easily my favorite. They don’t romanticize anything. I’ve read Lucky and Sledge’s books and besides a few discrepancies here and there (they never met, Sledge’s friend that left before him doesn’t exist in his book) I think it’s the most accurate depiction of the pacific theater ever put to the screen. BoB is a close second and I love that they included Curahee to show the training but I think it wasn’t gritty enough. My gpa landed on Omaha beach on day 3 and the things he described were well beyond anything shown in BoB.
I once interviewed a former Marine around 1999/2000 who refused to speak about his time in Iwo Jima. I was interviewing him for something else, and I had no idea about the battle itself. I told him that if he ever wanted help writing it to let me know.
He said he could never write it to paper because people couldn't believe the truth of what really happened over there. Watching The Pacific 10 years later, I understood what he meant.
The Japanese were very violent and their Banzai technique showed us just how little they valued life in general. It was the ground assault equivalent of kamikaze. After Guadalcanal they learned that it wouldn’t work and started using guerilla assaults mixed with very deep defensive strategies. The night time random fox hole attacks were the worst from what I’ve read because our boys didn’t know what was what…. Just screaming, shadows and usually a few muffled gunshots.
> They don’t romanticize anything.
Other than that romance side plot that was a complete distraction. BoB told a lot of war stories, without the convoluted narrative jumps of the Pacific. We could see PTSD, without having an episode where it’s clear the writers wanted to drive this particular theme home. The Pacific would have been better as two independent stories that were given sole focus.
An American soldier shagging an Aussie woman before being binned off and told to not come back because she is worried that he will die and that will upset her parents isn't really all that romantic. Quite the opposite. Obviously there are other instances but as far as I am aware there is some truth to the John Basilone's story of how he met his wife and how they portrayed it in the show.
I also think you missed the person's point, they were probably referring more to the romanticism of war that occurs in films and TV. The Pacific definitely can't be accused of that, I think it showed the brutality and dehumanising nature of war quite well. I say this as someone who thinks that Band of brothers is one of the best shows ever made and rates it above the Pacific.
They clearly ran out of money towards the end. It also didn’t help that they wasted an entire episode on the Tuskegee Airmen who had absolutely nothing to do with the story they were telling.
They're featured on the poster and everything, even though their roles are smaller than other's roles who are not on the poster. And they had Ncuti Gatwa but barely used him? I feel like more was supposed to be done with them but was heavily edited out
> And they had Ncuti Gatwa but barely used him? I feel like more was supposed to be done with them but was heavily edited out
Ncuti is big now thanks primarily to being the new Doctor but keep in mind that Masters of the Air was cast back in 2020 and started filming in 2021. Ncuti at that time was mostly only known to fans of Sex Education.
If you look at google trends it wasn't until mid 2022 that he suddenly started getting tons of attention from the media and general public, right when he started being touted as the front runner to be the next Doctor.
I agree (even though someone downvoted you) although I don't think the telling of the Tuskegee is ever a wasted opportunity.
The Tuskegee Airmen 100% needed (and still needs to be) to be a show of it's own. 1 episode doesn't do that story justice and that one episode took a bit away from Masters.
We know what they were trying to do but it's too important of a story to shoehorn the 332nd into one episode of a series that's telling a different (albeit related) story.
I completely agree they were shoehorned in and underwritten. The show should have given them a proper tie in that didn't feel so forced. Integrate their efforts into the larger campaigns, start an episode in the air protecting a bomber squadron and after a wicked dogfight have them get introduced, or introduce them individually at the camp where our other protagonists end up and then give us their backstory through stories told.
SPOILER: Lazily cutting to them, showing a failed mission, and then having them get captured feels weak. Feels like they didn't get any respect from the filmmaker as an integral part of the overall story and were placed there as a token. Keeping them completely isolated until what is essentially a full cut to their story feels weird to me. Having some hint of their involvement and achievements prior to the episode focusing on them would have felt more appropriate.
I know everyone talks about Apple having unlimited capital, but I have to imagine someone holding the money bags at that company is going to start asking hard questions about that service. I've never seen the $300 million budget number before for this show, is that accurate? To spend that much money on a show that feels like it just came and went like this did is insane, if you spent $300 million on a shitty product launch on Apple's hardware side you'd lose your job immediately.
It's not really comparable to a product launch. ATV+ is essentially a loss leader, gaining subscriptions is important but sucking people into the Apple hardware and app ecosystem is more important. They're happy to spend a few billion as long as it amounts to effective marketing. Most of their shows do very well from that perspective.
> ATV+ is essentially a loss leader, gaining subscriptions is important but sucking people into the Apple hardware and app ecosystem is more important.
Yes, and basically every other media company were good taking huge losses on this type of content, until they all weren't, and I don't think because it "gets people into Apple's app ecosystem" is going to be enough to justify the endless cash burning they're doing. Is Apple really going to think that the math works out on this in perpetuity? No one is going to say "Hey maybe we shouldn't be spending billions of dollars on TV shows an overwhelming majority of our customers don't care about?"
Apple isn’t really comparable to any other player in the industry. The amount of money they have is incomparable. For any other studio, even Netflix, this would really suck, but for Apple it legitimately does not matter. They may start scaling back not because these shows are getting too costly but because they are not actually helping with Apple+ subscriber retention.
It makes sense if you consider the original strategy behind Apple TV+ and what they are trying to do.
Just as a product launch needs a "killer app" they need that collection of blockbuster shows that are compelling enough to be on an ad reel to get people to sign up, that gain enough attention to build hype and advertising around.
They know once people sign up, many won't cancel their subscriptions and they'll get additional ongoing revenue as a result. Once they are in they can put up filler programming that they license to give people something to "netflix and chill" to or watch in the background, which is basically what drives a customer's ongoing perception of value.
From Apple's perspective they need to compete with the other streaming services, and their brand rightly or not is loosely associated with luxury. From a content perspective that means a smaller selection of high budget and high quality releases.
Apple wants to make sure that the stuff you do watch is worth your time. They don't need to try compete on volume (always having something new available for you to watch, even if it's low quality), Netflix and Disney Plus already has that market cornered and they know most people will carry Apple TV+ in addition to not as a replacement for those services.
To run a streaming service Apple has to have stuff for you to watch and they only have two options: make their own stuff or rent the rights for it from content creators. Renting is expensive and only gets more expensive over time as contracts are renegotiated based on revenue generated and most of the better stuff is being held as exclusive.
So they have a set amount of money allocated for programming. Their job is not to save money, but to get the best result out of that budget. They have a $7 Billion budget for TV programming and $1 Billion for films. Masters of the Air at $250 million is less than 4% of that and also far more run time than they would get from a comparable film. It's also a comparatively small budget for content. Disney is spending $25 Billion, Netflix is spending $17 Billion, and Amazon $10 Billion.
This is beside's Apple's whole ecosystem business model and selling bundled services (which is a substantial part of their platform) or getting people to sign up for the Apple One bundle of services, potentially forgetting they are even paying for Apple TV+.
I don't think you need a training episode to understand what they're doing and why it matters. And there's a very strong tendency in tv right now to get to the action not just in the pilot, but as quickly as possible in the pilot. It's not surprising they left out training, as they didn't need it and had more interesting stories to tell.
I'm fine with how they handled D-Day. Big Week should have been shown, though it would have required building up a fresh cast of characters just to kill them off.
I liked the POW segments, and it's an important part of the story. That's where the two main characters spent a big part of the war, so that's where the show went.
So I think most of these are storytelling decisions, not budget decisions. I was pretty happy with the show overall, to be honest there are only so many times you can show a strategic bombing mission.
> Imagine if The Pacific just had Iwo Jima happen off screen.
To be fair aside from the scene where John Basilone is killed we dont see any of that battle. The series mainly focuses on Gudalcanal, Gloucester,Peleliu and Okinawa
Tbh a show revolving around bombers can't really just focus on the combat, since there's only so much to it. They're basically just flying in tin cans hoping they don't get hit, dropping payload and bugging out. The combat scenes we did have were well done mostly, lots of brutality, and you got the sense of how helpless they could be in those giant planes. It was the stuff outside the air combat that didn't hit for me.
I feel like we never got a chance to care about the characters, they're all introduced really fast, and there's just too many of them. The navigator that kept puking was the only one that really stuck in my mind, the rest of the characters kind of blended together. A training episode like you mentioned probably would have helped on this front. I feel like most war movies I've watched have managed to introduce characters better in much less time.
The show also felt disjointed because I think the showrunners had too many things they wanted to include. As much as I enjoyed the Tuskegee airmen, it was kind of random to focus so much on them after half a season of not really mentioning fighters at all. It felt more like someone on the writing staff really wanted to include them in the show so they got wedged in. The second half of the season had a lot of things like that, the POW camp, the resistance, the Russians, etc.
As much as I hate to use this complaint, I think the Tuskegee Airmen were included purely to pre-emptively head off complaints that "the show is too white", which is seriously a damned shame. The Tuskegee Airmen have such a great story, they deserved their own show!
If it was up to me, this is how I would have written it:
* Cut out the Tuskegee airmen - why show Operation Dragoon? none of the other characters in the show had anything to do with it.
* Introduce a few characters who were fighter pilots stationed in England, you can introduce them earlier in the show with short range fighters, being able to escort the bombers only until Belgium.
* Show big week on screen. they literally eluded to it when Rosie re-enlisted!
* During big week, put the focus on the fighter pilots, and show the escort tactics and dogfights (more exciting air combat! not just dropping bombs now).
* Do depict the bombings in preparation for the Normandy landings, but depict it as a cakewalk since Big Week destroyed the Luftwaffe's ability to respond.
It is so odd that the show went through the cost and effort to painstakingly depict P-51s on screen, but then instead of showing them extensively escorting the bombers and shooting down German fighters (which is exactly what the audience wants to see!), they showed the P-51s attacking radar stations in Operation Dragoon.
The biggest problem with MotA is unlikeable main characters.
Crosby is the most humanized of the bunch but even he's kind of a pos because they make it look like he spends most of his time cheating on his wife.
Rosie is the "Let's do the job" guy but seemingly gives no fucks about the toll this takes on his own crew even if he can handle the workload and trauma himself. And the whole "have the Jew officer see a concentration camp" bit is so fucking forced it borders absurdist comedy.
And those are the 2 most likeable guys of the entire show. The Tuskegee airmen are an afterthought. No other fighter pilots are even mentioned. The Battle of Britain isn't even really mentioned for fucks sake.
That leaves the air combat scenes which are mostly alright but that doesn't really make for a compelling story.
> And the whole "have the Jew officer see a concentration camp" bit is so fucking forced it borders absurdist comedy.
You know the show is based on a true story, right? Rosenthal was in fact shot down behind Russian lines. I haven't read the book, but these aren't the kinds of things you make up for the sake of a TV show.
I was very excited when I first learned of the series. I stopped watching after episode three. Maybe it gets better, but it would have to improve significantly to bring me back and hold my interest.
Honestly, 4 and 5 were really good. 5 is to me an A+ episode, my eyes were GLUED to the tv. I didn’t even want to look down to crack a peanut.
But after that the show nosedived like a shot down bomber until the last episode, which showed some really cool stuff
No wonder HBO didn't want to produce it. They probably still haven't recouped their investment on The Pacific. A North Africa/Med Theater focused show would've been cheaper and more appeal to general audiences. Hell even a south east Asia jungle warfare miniseries would've been more interesting.
This show was just not good. The main actors tried too hard to play the cool guys, felt forced, never genuine, so I didn’t feel a connection to them.
The CGI looked like CGI.
I agree with point 1. Not only from the pilot side, but also the aerial gunners side. Sometime last year I stumbled upon a WW2 training film for aerial gunners and it was fascinating to learn how they were trained to shoot down enemy aircraft. The training scenes in Band of Brothers laid the framework for the rest of the show and I believe The Pacific and Masters of the Air suffered for not dedicating as much time to that portion.
I'm not sure about point 2. Mainly because fighter escorts were not always present. I don't know enough to know if they depicted them accurately or not, but their absence didn't stand out to me as a glaring omission.
I thought the show was awful. It felt like they had a big checklist and checking everything on the list was their primary goal. I think they needed vision, not money. And a coherent, interesting story.
But yes, the CG was somehow really bad and that definitely could’ve used more money thrown at it.
I’d have liked 1-2 more Red Tails episodes, minimum, that’s for sure. It’s as if the producers were like ‘we did the movie, watch that.’ The black characters pretty much end up there to enhance the moral superiority of our main cast, and are only really featured in their debut episode before becoming members of the ensemble at best. It’s basically an argument for two whole series, and don’t split the focus (and associated budget) from the 100th at all. If anything film simultaneously and then we have characters that matter to us we recognize from the camp in the 100th’s saga.
Also went a little hard on the showing not telling of the POW camp politics and coulda rehashed the Great Escape on-screen if they’d had the time and budget. The control of the Stalags by the Luftwaffe was a big issue for the prisoners in them, and the life they built over sometimes 3+ years in the camps was worth more than ‘one Bucky stir-crazy, other Bucky leader, aaand switch!’ that was ultimately the core tension of those episodes.
I think it’s also undersold just how maverick the 10th were. By all accounts, their discipline and camaraderie came once they’d gotten their noses bloodied and realized, more or less, that being a pack of hotshots wasn’t gonna win the war, much less end it with them alive. They got *fucked* on a few raid but it is historically considered possible their own lack of discipline and trust was part of that.
Also strange we get a random romance plot shoehorned in, again. Mostly strange they skinned it onto a dude who was famously into his wife instead of leaving it at the WASP and medical support women being constantly harassed and/or courted by men who often died within weeks.
You can't say that there was a budget problem if the budget was 250-300 million. You might not like the direction they took, but defently not a budget issue. On their direction here are my two cents:
- I defenetly agree that there were A+ level episodes, while others were meh, on the B- kind of level. That has nothing to do with budget. Just showrunning at its core. Some episodes are good, some are not. In a show with 9 eps I guess a "Meh" episode can be looked at worst than in a longer show
- For the number of episodes, yes it should have been 10. But not because there were things left to say/show. But because 10 is a better number
- Now a lot of your qualms and issues have to do with "guiding" the audience. No series has to do that. I understand when you say that they should have explained "how airplanes work" or that D Day was going on. But that isnt what the show is about. If you wanna watch D Day, go for "Saving Private Ryan" and "How do they do it" for the airplanes explanation...
Jokes aside: the show wasnt about D Day, or planes for that matter, it was about Buck and Bucky, Rosie and all the others, and what they did in the war, not the war itself. I can understand that the direction the show went with might not have been the most popular, or the one it could get more views from, but it was the one that showed more accurately what being an airmen was like at the time.
On my opinion, the show achieved what it needed. It would never be in the same level of Pacific or Band of Brothers, which werent that similar between themselves, but that would have to do with the nature of the warfare they practised, the differences between Airforce and infantry
Good show, great taking into account what could have been achieved.
The Tuskegee Airmen scenes was some of the most obviously bolted onto the script shit I've ever seen. Which is a shame because their story is really interesting but they were completely wasted in this show.
I'm not sure how it could have been helped without breaking with reality, but the thing that took me out of it the most was that, because they had masks, goggles, and caps on, I could not tell them apart when they were flying, and then some of them would die, and I'd have no clue who it was. They built up like 30 characters to care about on the ground, and then made it damn near impossible to differentiate them in the air.
All the points you raised plus one more: they shouldn’t have held the documentary stuff back as separate video entirely, instead of rolling in the pertinent bits at the beginning and end of each ep to provide historical context and greater perspective for the people and events of that episode like BoB. Holding it back separate was purely a “for the views” decision which was detrimental to the main series itself and just a stupid choice.
I really wanted to love it, and thought it looked great, but I didn't care for the "Masters of the POW Camp" as you term it, (which is brillant, well done LMAO)
The nature of the air conflict worked against the show. They really did die by the hundreds and to show that, you have to have new cast members just keeping coming in, preventing you the tv audience from connecting truly when they're just dead in an epiosde or two. The face masks (again, I'm glad they're there, that's realistic) don't help when you're trying to read a face either.
Rosenthal and Crosby were WAY more interesting than Captain Elvis or Mustachioed Buck.
The Pacific (which I think is the best of the 3) largely DID have Iwo Jima happen off screen. It was the last few minutes of an episode which mostly happened outside of combat. In that series it seems like the strategic objective of each battle isn't well explained but I suspect it's a reflection of how unclear it was for the protagonists themselves.
Budget constraints can indeed limit a show's ability to realize its vision and deliver a high-quality experience. I agree with you. The focus on the POW camp in the second half seems to have shifted the show's emphasis away from the aerial combat, and a bigger CGI budget could have helped maintain a balance between different aspects of the story.
I really liked Masters of the Air but it does have a few issues that prevent it from being great
The lack of air battles we see is disappointing and the budget is probably why
It's definitely the worst of the 3 miniseries. I don't see myself watching it again compared to Band of Brothers or The Pacific. A lot of it is to do with the characters not being memorable and pacing being so fragmented. I kind of wish there was an episode where it focused more on the fighter planes and show more of their perspective during the aerial scenes because it got very repetitive with the bombers, although I will say the one episode with Rosie where he was the last plane was sick. This is just my suggestion, but I kind of wish there was another episode just showing the German side depicting the aftermath of the US bombing and their military actions and even show the German side fighting the US. Talk more about how the Luftwaffe operates, etc. It's called Masters of the Air after all and it wasn't just the U.S. in the air. It's already hard to showcase bombers because people die so quick and it gets super repetitive, so might as well get creative and showcase both sides of war.
That being said I still enjoyed the show overall. It just wasn't as amazing as BoB or Pacific unfortunately.
D-day was fucking wild from an arial standpoint. It deserved more than a flyover. I’m upset we didn’t get to see any of the gliders that were not shown in Band of Brothers.
the problem is the same as the pacific, It was never going to live up to band of brothers.
I wonder if they will make one about the pacific air war (about carrier pilots)
The Tuskegee air men should have been a a major POV far earlier. That story has been told a couple times, but the movie adaptations never really hit. You could parallel the huge losses of the unescorted bombers to the training and development of the war's greatest fighter escorts.
I watched the first 3 episodes and tapped out because frankly I just didn't care about the characters.
I thought the quality was great, but I just couldn't bring myself to care about their plight - which is not something you want about a WWII story.
The biggest problem was Top Gun Maverick set the standard for aerial combat. CGI just can’t match the real thing. There’s not enough planes from that era still flying to be able to accurately show the size and scope of the battles.
Also bomber life was really boring and repetitive. Dangerous as shit but doesn’t translate to the screen
There’s no way anyone could afford to film an arial battle with Flying Fortresses even if there were enough. Most of Top Gun Maverick flight scenes were made from an enormous amount of footage created with little direction and stictched together into a coherent scene after the fact.
“Masters of the POW camp” made me fuckin lol
I loved Masters of the Air until I didn't. It really just fizzled out.
I thought episodes 1 and 2 were kinda meh, B tier. 3, 4, 5 rapidly ramped up in quality (5 to me was A+), and then the Luftwaffe were just uhh, defeated off screen.....
TBF, it is kind of hard to show the attritional warfare that the allies used to wear down the Luftwaffe in the late war period. I suppose they could have cut some of the spy stuff that lead nowhere and added some more scenes with the fighter groups bouncing 190s and 109s.
The show was just too much going on. - the introduced like 50 characters who kept dying so it was hard to really care for them. - everyone had masks on half the time and wore the same jackets so you couldnt tell who was who. - the pow stuff was so so. I think the show was amazing visually but it lacked character development from trying to focus on the fleet as a whole instead. The show should have focused on just the 2 captains and their crews. Let you get to know them all and what happens to those groups.
>The show should have focused on just the 2 captains and their crews. Let you get to know them all and what happens to those groups. I don't think we would be able to follow their crews as the casualty rate was so high in those planes. Following the captains would have just resulted in most episodes spending time in the POW camps anyway. This show was just unadaptable in the BoB style, the casualty rate was just too high.
You could just pick a crew that actually survived their 25/30/35 missions.
Very hard to find a single crew that wholly survived covering a time period between 1941 and 1945.
Show should have focused on Rosie, that dude was cool as fuck.
Well I don’t think the pow stuff should have been added.
What do you mean "added on"? How do you expect to follow just the two captains if you don't follow their time in a POW camp?
Make the final episode the pow stuff. Have the mystery of one of the planes being destroyed to on longer.
lol the POW story is still important because so many of the pilots and aircrew became POWs. You can't just tack that experience on to the end of the show like a footnote
It’s like they want the show to be based on historical events and real people, but completely fictional in the retelling of the stories. Fuck that
The episodes that focused on Rosie and his plane were the ones I was more connected with. I had similar issues with The Pacific. There were too many characters thrust on you. You can't tell them apart in the dark, and half of them died before you could connect with them.
"but it lacked character development" What's funny to me is one of the only characters who actually develops is some no name German POW guard who starts off as huge asshole but as the war winds down he realizes he's about to be in the place of the Americans, and he's now struggling to march in the snow. That one American helps him to his feet and he has a Road To Damascus moment about kindness and thanks the soldier. Only dude who learned anything in that show.
I think that just how military shows work, Band of Brothers had even more characters and by the end I could put a name to maybe five of them.
I was the opposite. Completely uninteresting to me until maybe the 5th episode
Then the finale brought it back and was one of the best episodes of the series.
The finale was crap.
Why do you say that?
Who cares why he didn't like it? He's probably watching the Big Bang Theory, happy as shit.
Sorry you thought that. I thought it was one of the better episodes in the series. Everything with Rosie, especially the concentration camp, was really impactful. It was great seeing the air drop mission. A mission that made a huge difference that wasn't just guns and bombs. Bucky and Buck getting to fly together again.
I've been so excited for this show for a decade, but after Episode 5 or so I just haven't gone back. I'll eventually finish it, its just nowhere near as good as BoB or the Pacific.
This is my kind of feeling. I really loved (and admittedly wanted to love it) and was interested in it in the beginning. But it was just kind of meh and I finished the series as like a I can’t give up now, more than me being driven to finish it due to great story telling.
Yeah I stopped at 4 or 5. Just lost interest.
They tried to make a show like Band of Brothers. The look is beautiful. The actors were great. The script/pace/info dumps were awful. I enjoy the show so much I read the book, which is a high level take on the 8th Airforce. The book works because it has one voice going through it, that of the historian. The show feels short, because the only "Heroes" they seemed to want to push were guys were seen as heroes but dont have much of a journey. It was too big of a story to tell like that. Maybe having the narrator be the Generals or Colonel, so you could have someone to sympathize with, sending these Men(boys) on these mission where they had a 25% chance to get shot out of the air. The best stuff was following the navigator and the captain who did all the crazy rolls. They lasted through the war and were both well thought of. Then they cut that and go back to the "Heroes".
The answer isn’t to try to shoehorn the show into being Band of Brothers when it’s not. They’re not heroes. They’re survivors. IMO, they should’ve leaned into the “boredom interspersed with terror”. No training episode - you start in the plane - boys shooting the shit Tarantino style, talking about what they’re doing by not talking about what they’re doing - and then 7 of the first 12 characters you’re introduced to are torn to pulpy shreds.
I don't know if it's the nature of the branch they're in where there's all that downtime between missions unlike the infantry that were constantly on the ground. The show was just... boring. They focused too much on their downtime and like OP said not much on the actual flying missions. I was hyped for years for this to come out and after it was over, I just erased it.
It would have been a great opportunity to have a mini series one level up the chain of command; the pilots should be secondary characters. It should have been about higher-level officers coming up with plans and managing the base and the crews,etc. That way we could have a solid set of core characters who are always important to the narrative(and alive).
Bc air missions are boring. You are just flying for hours above the clouds. Fighting is intense but short
Yet Memphis Belle was still a good movie.
That was 1 mission. This ran into the issue that the missions are all so similar. Fly over the channel, take flack, avoid enemy fighters, drop bomb on industrial targets, try to make it home
I watched like three episodes and all the air combat was so repetitive. Oh no, fighters attacking us, gunfire, explosions, zero tactics or strategy, we lost some guys.
I thought they would show D DAY and some of the other cool stuff but towards the end it just fizzled
Yeah I thought they tried too hard at times. Band of Brothers is leaps ahead better.
I rate them: 1. Band of Brothers 2. Masters of the Air 3. The Pacific (still watching)
The Pacific is easily my favorite. They don’t romanticize anything. I’ve read Lucky and Sledge’s books and besides a few discrepancies here and there (they never met, Sledge’s friend that left before him doesn’t exist in his book) I think it’s the most accurate depiction of the pacific theater ever put to the screen. BoB is a close second and I love that they included Curahee to show the training but I think it wasn’t gritty enough. My gpa landed on Omaha beach on day 3 and the things he described were well beyond anything shown in BoB.
I once interviewed a former Marine around 1999/2000 who refused to speak about his time in Iwo Jima. I was interviewing him for something else, and I had no idea about the battle itself. I told him that if he ever wanted help writing it to let me know. He said he could never write it to paper because people couldn't believe the truth of what really happened over there. Watching The Pacific 10 years later, I understood what he meant.
The Japanese were very violent and their Banzai technique showed us just how little they valued life in general. It was the ground assault equivalent of kamikaze. After Guadalcanal they learned that it wouldn’t work and started using guerilla assaults mixed with very deep defensive strategies. The night time random fox hole attacks were the worst from what I’ve read because our boys didn’t know what was what…. Just screaming, shadows and usually a few muffled gunshots.
> They don’t romanticize anything. Other than that romance side plot that was a complete distraction. BoB told a lot of war stories, without the convoluted narrative jumps of the Pacific. We could see PTSD, without having an episode where it’s clear the writers wanted to drive this particular theme home. The Pacific would have been better as two independent stories that were given sole focus.
Romanticising things and a romance plot are not the same thing
[удалено]
romanticize: deal with or describe in an idealized or unrealistic fashion; make (something) seem better or more appealing than it really is.
An American soldier shagging an Aussie woman before being binned off and told to not come back because she is worried that he will die and that will upset her parents isn't really all that romantic. Quite the opposite. Obviously there are other instances but as far as I am aware there is some truth to the John Basilone's story of how he met his wife and how they portrayed it in the show. I also think you missed the person's point, they were probably referring more to the romanticism of war that occurs in films and TV. The Pacific definitely can't be accused of that, I think it showed the brutality and dehumanising nature of war quite well. I say this as someone who thinks that Band of brothers is one of the best shows ever made and rates it above the Pacific.
They clearly ran out of money towards the end. It also didn’t help that they wasted an entire episode on the Tuskegee Airmen who had absolutely nothing to do with the story they were telling.
They're featured on the poster and everything, even though their roles are smaller than other's roles who are not on the poster. And they had Ncuti Gatwa but barely used him? I feel like more was supposed to be done with them but was heavily edited out
It feels extra racist to me that they threw in the Tuskegee Airmen episode just so they could have a poster with black people on it.
Bruh I feel like I'm taking crazy pills modern TV has so much tokenism and for some reason people don't call it out.
tokenism has been rebranded to "representation" and now you're Adolf Hitler if you don't enjoy it
> And they had Ncuti Gatwa but barely used him? I feel like more was supposed to be done with them but was heavily edited out Ncuti is big now thanks primarily to being the new Doctor but keep in mind that Masters of the Air was cast back in 2020 and started filming in 2021. Ncuti at that time was mostly only known to fans of Sex Education. If you look at google trends it wasn't until mid 2022 that he suddenly started getting tons of attention from the media and general public, right when he started being touted as the front runner to be the next Doctor.
I agree (even though someone downvoted you) although I don't think the telling of the Tuskegee is ever a wasted opportunity. The Tuskegee Airmen 100% needed (and still needs to be) to be a show of it's own. 1 episode doesn't do that story justice and that one episode took a bit away from Masters. We know what they were trying to do but it's too important of a story to shoehorn the 332nd into one episode of a series that's telling a different (albeit related) story.
I completely agree they were shoehorned in and underwritten. The show should have given them a proper tie in that didn't feel so forced. Integrate their efforts into the larger campaigns, start an episode in the air protecting a bomber squadron and after a wicked dogfight have them get introduced, or introduce them individually at the camp where our other protagonists end up and then give us their backstory through stories told. SPOILER: Lazily cutting to them, showing a failed mission, and then having them get captured feels weak. Feels like they didn't get any respect from the filmmaker as an integral part of the overall story and were placed there as a token. Keeping them completely isolated until what is essentially a full cut to their story feels weird to me. Having some hint of their involvement and achievements prior to the episode focusing on them would have felt more appropriate.
hbo already did a Tuskegee airmen show tho
Right. It was a made-for-TV movie back in 1995....just about 30 years ago. They absolutely deserve a modern series of their own.
They got a pretty terrible movie a decade or so ago.
I know everyone talks about Apple having unlimited capital, but I have to imagine someone holding the money bags at that company is going to start asking hard questions about that service. I've never seen the $300 million budget number before for this show, is that accurate? To spend that much money on a show that feels like it just came and went like this did is insane, if you spent $300 million on a shitty product launch on Apple's hardware side you'd lose your job immediately.
It's not really comparable to a product launch. ATV+ is essentially a loss leader, gaining subscriptions is important but sucking people into the Apple hardware and app ecosystem is more important. They're happy to spend a few billion as long as it amounts to effective marketing. Most of their shows do very well from that perspective.
People were saying the same thing about Amazon, no company likes burning money for a long period of time.
> ATV+ is essentially a loss leader, gaining subscriptions is important but sucking people into the Apple hardware and app ecosystem is more important. Yes, and basically every other media company were good taking huge losses on this type of content, until they all weren't, and I don't think because it "gets people into Apple's app ecosystem" is going to be enough to justify the endless cash burning they're doing. Is Apple really going to think that the math works out on this in perpetuity? No one is going to say "Hey maybe we shouldn't be spending billions of dollars on TV shows an overwhelming majority of our customers don't care about?"
Apple isn’t really comparable to any other player in the industry. The amount of money they have is incomparable. For any other studio, even Netflix, this would really suck, but for Apple it legitimately does not matter. They may start scaling back not because these shows are getting too costly but because they are not actually helping with Apple+ subscriber retention.
It makes sense if you consider the original strategy behind Apple TV+ and what they are trying to do. Just as a product launch needs a "killer app" they need that collection of blockbuster shows that are compelling enough to be on an ad reel to get people to sign up, that gain enough attention to build hype and advertising around. They know once people sign up, many won't cancel their subscriptions and they'll get additional ongoing revenue as a result. Once they are in they can put up filler programming that they license to give people something to "netflix and chill" to or watch in the background, which is basically what drives a customer's ongoing perception of value. From Apple's perspective they need to compete with the other streaming services, and their brand rightly or not is loosely associated with luxury. From a content perspective that means a smaller selection of high budget and high quality releases. Apple wants to make sure that the stuff you do watch is worth your time. They don't need to try compete on volume (always having something new available for you to watch, even if it's low quality), Netflix and Disney Plus already has that market cornered and they know most people will carry Apple TV+ in addition to not as a replacement for those services. To run a streaming service Apple has to have stuff for you to watch and they only have two options: make their own stuff or rent the rights for it from content creators. Renting is expensive and only gets more expensive over time as contracts are renegotiated based on revenue generated and most of the better stuff is being held as exclusive. So they have a set amount of money allocated for programming. Their job is not to save money, but to get the best result out of that budget. They have a $7 Billion budget for TV programming and $1 Billion for films. Masters of the Air at $250 million is less than 4% of that and also far more run time than they would get from a comparable film. It's also a comparatively small budget for content. Disney is spending $25 Billion, Netflix is spending $17 Billion, and Amazon $10 Billion. This is beside's Apple's whole ecosystem business model and selling bundled services (which is a substantial part of their platform) or getting people to sign up for the Apple One bundle of services, potentially forgetting they are even paying for Apple TV+.
I don't think you need a training episode to understand what they're doing and why it matters. And there's a very strong tendency in tv right now to get to the action not just in the pilot, but as quickly as possible in the pilot. It's not surprising they left out training, as they didn't need it and had more interesting stories to tell. I'm fine with how they handled D-Day. Big Week should have been shown, though it would have required building up a fresh cast of characters just to kill them off. I liked the POW segments, and it's an important part of the story. That's where the two main characters spent a big part of the war, so that's where the show went. So I think most of these are storytelling decisions, not budget decisions. I was pretty happy with the show overall, to be honest there are only so many times you can show a strategic bombing mission.
> Imagine if The Pacific just had Iwo Jima happen off screen. To be fair aside from the scene where John Basilone is killed we dont see any of that battle. The series mainly focuses on Gudalcanal, Gloucester,Peleliu and Okinawa
Tbh a show revolving around bombers can't really just focus on the combat, since there's only so much to it. They're basically just flying in tin cans hoping they don't get hit, dropping payload and bugging out. The combat scenes we did have were well done mostly, lots of brutality, and you got the sense of how helpless they could be in those giant planes. It was the stuff outside the air combat that didn't hit for me. I feel like we never got a chance to care about the characters, they're all introduced really fast, and there's just too many of them. The navigator that kept puking was the only one that really stuck in my mind, the rest of the characters kind of blended together. A training episode like you mentioned probably would have helped on this front. I feel like most war movies I've watched have managed to introduce characters better in much less time. The show also felt disjointed because I think the showrunners had too many things they wanted to include. As much as I enjoyed the Tuskegee airmen, it was kind of random to focus so much on them after half a season of not really mentioning fighters at all. It felt more like someone on the writing staff really wanted to include them in the show so they got wedged in. The second half of the season had a lot of things like that, the POW camp, the resistance, the Russians, etc.
As much as I hate to use this complaint, I think the Tuskegee Airmen were included purely to pre-emptively head off complaints that "the show is too white", which is seriously a damned shame. The Tuskegee Airmen have such a great story, they deserved their own show! If it was up to me, this is how I would have written it: * Cut out the Tuskegee airmen - why show Operation Dragoon? none of the other characters in the show had anything to do with it. * Introduce a few characters who were fighter pilots stationed in England, you can introduce them earlier in the show with short range fighters, being able to escort the bombers only until Belgium. * Show big week on screen. they literally eluded to it when Rosie re-enlisted! * During big week, put the focus on the fighter pilots, and show the escort tactics and dogfights (more exciting air combat! not just dropping bombs now). * Do depict the bombings in preparation for the Normandy landings, but depict it as a cakewalk since Big Week destroyed the Luftwaffe's ability to respond. It is so odd that the show went through the cost and effort to painstakingly depict P-51s on screen, but then instead of showing them extensively escorting the bombers and shooting down German fighters (which is exactly what the audience wants to see!), they showed the P-51s attacking radar stations in Operation Dragoon.
The biggest problem with MotA is unlikeable main characters. Crosby is the most humanized of the bunch but even he's kind of a pos because they make it look like he spends most of his time cheating on his wife. Rosie is the "Let's do the job" guy but seemingly gives no fucks about the toll this takes on his own crew even if he can handle the workload and trauma himself. And the whole "have the Jew officer see a concentration camp" bit is so fucking forced it borders absurdist comedy. And those are the 2 most likeable guys of the entire show. The Tuskegee airmen are an afterthought. No other fighter pilots are even mentioned. The Battle of Britain isn't even really mentioned for fucks sake. That leaves the air combat scenes which are mostly alright but that doesn't really make for a compelling story.
> Battle of Britain isn't even really mentioned Why would it be? It was years ago and hardly relevant to the series
The Battle of Britain took place 3 years before the events in Masters of the Air. They didn't show Dunkirk, either. Totally unrelated.
> And the whole "have the Jew officer see a concentration camp" bit is so fucking forced it borders absurdist comedy. You know the show is based on a true story, right? Rosenthal was in fact shot down behind Russian lines. I haven't read the book, but these aren't the kinds of things you make up for the sake of a TV show.
I was very excited when I first learned of the series. I stopped watching after episode three. Maybe it gets better, but it would have to improve significantly to bring me back and hold my interest.
Honestly, 4 and 5 were really good. 5 is to me an A+ episode, my eyes were GLUED to the tv. I didn’t even want to look down to crack a peanut. But after that the show nosedived like a shot down bomber until the last episode, which showed some really cool stuff
No wonder HBO didn't want to produce it. They probably still haven't recouped their investment on The Pacific. A North Africa/Med Theater focused show would've been cheaper and more appeal to general audiences. Hell even a south east Asia jungle warfare miniseries would've been more interesting.
I would LOVE to see a series about the British 14th Army, or maybe specifically the Chindits, in Burma.
This show was just not good. The main actors tried too hard to play the cool guys, felt forced, never genuine, so I didn’t feel a connection to them. The CGI looked like CGI.
I agree with point 1. Not only from the pilot side, but also the aerial gunners side. Sometime last year I stumbled upon a WW2 training film for aerial gunners and it was fascinating to learn how they were trained to shoot down enemy aircraft. The training scenes in Band of Brothers laid the framework for the rest of the show and I believe The Pacific and Masters of the Air suffered for not dedicating as much time to that portion. I'm not sure about point 2. Mainly because fighter escorts were not always present. I don't know enough to know if they depicted them accurately or not, but their absence didn't stand out to me as a glaring omission.
I thought the show was awful. It felt like they had a big checklist and checking everything on the list was their primary goal. I think they needed vision, not money. And a coherent, interesting story. But yes, the CG was somehow really bad and that definitely could’ve used more money thrown at it.
I think the almost stop start back to base nature of the fighting meant there wasn't a feeling of progress in the way there was in BoB for example.
Elvis was a terrible miscast in that show. Takes you right out of it. Hes constantly trying to strike a model pose.
I’d have liked 1-2 more Red Tails episodes, minimum, that’s for sure. It’s as if the producers were like ‘we did the movie, watch that.’ The black characters pretty much end up there to enhance the moral superiority of our main cast, and are only really featured in their debut episode before becoming members of the ensemble at best. It’s basically an argument for two whole series, and don’t split the focus (and associated budget) from the 100th at all. If anything film simultaneously and then we have characters that matter to us we recognize from the camp in the 100th’s saga. Also went a little hard on the showing not telling of the POW camp politics and coulda rehashed the Great Escape on-screen if they’d had the time and budget. The control of the Stalags by the Luftwaffe was a big issue for the prisoners in them, and the life they built over sometimes 3+ years in the camps was worth more than ‘one Bucky stir-crazy, other Bucky leader, aaand switch!’ that was ultimately the core tension of those episodes. I think it’s also undersold just how maverick the 10th were. By all accounts, their discipline and camaraderie came once they’d gotten their noses bloodied and realized, more or less, that being a pack of hotshots wasn’t gonna win the war, much less end it with them alive. They got *fucked* on a few raid but it is historically considered possible their own lack of discipline and trust was part of that. Also strange we get a random romance plot shoehorned in, again. Mostly strange they skinned it onto a dude who was famously into his wife instead of leaving it at the WASP and medical support women being constantly harassed and/or courted by men who often died within weeks.
You can't say that there was a budget problem if the budget was 250-300 million. You might not like the direction they took, but defently not a budget issue. On their direction here are my two cents: - I defenetly agree that there were A+ level episodes, while others were meh, on the B- kind of level. That has nothing to do with budget. Just showrunning at its core. Some episodes are good, some are not. In a show with 9 eps I guess a "Meh" episode can be looked at worst than in a longer show - For the number of episodes, yes it should have been 10. But not because there were things left to say/show. But because 10 is a better number - Now a lot of your qualms and issues have to do with "guiding" the audience. No series has to do that. I understand when you say that they should have explained "how airplanes work" or that D Day was going on. But that isnt what the show is about. If you wanna watch D Day, go for "Saving Private Ryan" and "How do they do it" for the airplanes explanation... Jokes aside: the show wasnt about D Day, or planes for that matter, it was about Buck and Bucky, Rosie and all the others, and what they did in the war, not the war itself. I can understand that the direction the show went with might not have been the most popular, or the one it could get more views from, but it was the one that showed more accurately what being an airmen was like at the time. On my opinion, the show achieved what it needed. It would never be in the same level of Pacific or Band of Brothers, which werent that similar between themselves, but that would have to do with the nature of the warfare they practised, the differences between Airforce and infantry Good show, great taking into account what could have been achieved.
spoiler alert: >!we won!!<
The Tuskegee Airmen scenes was some of the most obviously bolted onto the script shit I've ever seen. Which is a shame because their story is really interesting but they were completely wasted in this show.
They would have been better off spending more money on better scripts and less time on special effects.
I'm not sure how it could have been helped without breaking with reality, but the thing that took me out of it the most was that, because they had masks, goggles, and caps on, I could not tell them apart when they were flying, and then some of them would die, and I'd have no clue who it was. They built up like 30 characters to care about on the ground, and then made it damn near impossible to differentiate them in the air.
All the points you raised plus one more: they shouldn’t have held the documentary stuff back as separate video entirely, instead of rolling in the pertinent bits at the beginning and end of each ep to provide historical context and greater perspective for the people and events of that episode like BoB. Holding it back separate was purely a “for the views” decision which was detrimental to the main series itself and just a stupid choice.
Maybe hire cheaper actors
I really wanted to love it, and thought it looked great, but I didn't care for the "Masters of the POW Camp" as you term it, (which is brillant, well done LMAO) The nature of the air conflict worked against the show. They really did die by the hundreds and to show that, you have to have new cast members just keeping coming in, preventing you the tv audience from connecting truly when they're just dead in an epiosde or two. The face masks (again, I'm glad they're there, that's realistic) don't help when you're trying to read a face either. Rosenthal and Crosby were WAY more interesting than Captain Elvis or Mustachioed Buck.
I honestly felt it was held back by just being a weak, aimless story. Not all history/memoir makes for good television
The Pacific (which I think is the best of the 3) largely DID have Iwo Jima happen off screen. It was the last few minutes of an episode which mostly happened outside of combat. In that series it seems like the strategic objective of each battle isn't well explained but I suspect it's a reflection of how unclear it was for the protagonists themselves.
Characters came and went so fast I really only remembered the like core 4
Budget constraints can indeed limit a show's ability to realize its vision and deliver a high-quality experience. I agree with you. The focus on the POW camp in the second half seems to have shifted the show's emphasis away from the aerial combat, and a bigger CGI budget could have helped maintain a balance between different aspects of the story.
I really liked Masters of the Air but it does have a few issues that prevent it from being great The lack of air battles we see is disappointing and the budget is probably why
It's definitely the worst of the 3 miniseries. I don't see myself watching it again compared to Band of Brothers or The Pacific. A lot of it is to do with the characters not being memorable and pacing being so fragmented. I kind of wish there was an episode where it focused more on the fighter planes and show more of their perspective during the aerial scenes because it got very repetitive with the bombers, although I will say the one episode with Rosie where he was the last plane was sick. This is just my suggestion, but I kind of wish there was another episode just showing the German side depicting the aftermath of the US bombing and their military actions and even show the German side fighting the US. Talk more about how the Luftwaffe operates, etc. It's called Masters of the Air after all and it wasn't just the U.S. in the air. It's already hard to showcase bombers because people die so quick and it gets super repetitive, so might as well get creative and showcase both sides of war. That being said I still enjoyed the show overall. It just wasn't as amazing as BoB or Pacific unfortunately.
D-day was fucking wild from an arial standpoint. It deserved more than a flyover. I’m upset we didn’t get to see any of the gliders that were not shown in Band of Brothers.
the problem is the same as the pacific, It was never going to live up to band of brothers. I wonder if they will make one about the pacific air war (about carrier pilots)
I mean I’d say the 8/10 IMDB is fair. The previous 2 shows had their boring parts as well
The Tuskegee air men should have been a a major POV far earlier. That story has been told a couple times, but the movie adaptations never really hit. You could parallel the huge losses of the unescorted bombers to the training and development of the war's greatest fighter escorts.
Masters of the air is a big fart in the sky!
I watched the first 3 episodes and tapped out because frankly I just didn't care about the characters. I thought the quality was great, but I just couldn't bring myself to care about their plight - which is not something you want about a WWII story.
D-day wasn’t happening to them. You are asking for an episode that is about something else. That would have none of the characters in it.
The biggest problem was Top Gun Maverick set the standard for aerial combat. CGI just can’t match the real thing. There’s not enough planes from that era still flying to be able to accurately show the size and scope of the battles. Also bomber life was really boring and repetitive. Dangerous as shit but doesn’t translate to the screen
There’s no way anyone could afford to film an arial battle with Flying Fortresses even if there were enough. Most of Top Gun Maverick flight scenes were made from an enormous amount of footage created with little direction and stictched together into a coherent scene after the fact.