Airbenders, in red, white and blue

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 stuffed with anti-aircraft flak, past harrying enemy fighter planes; they need to freeze in the upper atmosphere, respiratory through leather oxygen masks; they need to mentally absorb the inevitable hits to the airplane and the terrible injuries to the boys inside, then adjust their tactics to compensate for the lack of those airplane parts and men; they need to make the (pen-and-paper!) calculations crucial to locate the goal, drop the bombs, and then get the hell back to base—or else bail out, into occupied territory.

This is extremely dramatic stuff. Masters of the Air, the Apple TV+ show that drops a two-part premiere on Friday, knows it, and makes probably the most of it. The miniseries stars Austin Butler, Callum Turner, and Barry Keoghan as airmen of the “Bloody 100^th,” a gaggle 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, in addition to for its airmen’s colourful personalities. The show has been in the works since 2013, developed by Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, and Gary Goetzman, 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 forged, Masters of the Air still represents a giant bet for the streamer, even when it’s arriving barely later than expected.

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

This intensive immersion in the small print 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 protracted, arduous trial of endurance. The most memorable episode of that series was a couple of month Easy spent, undersupplied and freezing, near Bastogne through the Battle of the Bulge. Episode 6 follows company medic Eugene Roe (Shane Taylor) as he scurries across the snowy forest and tends to injured man after injured man, slowly losing his grip on sanity. A Belgian nurse he befriends near the start of the hour gets killed in a bombardment near the tip. 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 special rhythm, and one that could be more conducive to the event of a broader audience. The 100^th was stationed at a base—Thorpe Abbotts, in East Anglia—where, with quite 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 couple of sex scenes. All this brotherly conviviality is punctuated by the bombing runs: motion 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 inside parts of the plane; sometimes those actors appear to be they’re being rattled around like frogs in a coffee can.)

Also working to the show’s profit, on the subject of reaching an audience outside of war nerds, are the important thing figures of Masters of the Air, who were, historically speaking, colourful and charismatic. Band of Brothers appeared to aim for a bit more anonymity in its characters, who are likely to run together. Back in 2001, when Band of Brothers got here out, its lead, Damian Lewis, was not yet Homeland or Billions Damian Lewis—only a redheaded Brit who turned out to be really good at playing Americans. His Dick Winters, a teetotaling Pennsylvanian and surefooted leader who at all times knows what to do, becomes a stable, unwavering point of focus for the viewer. When Winters takes control of a situation, like the boys under his command, you calm down slightly. 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 regular one who’s loyal to his girl back home, and John “Bucky” Egan (Turner), the ebullient troublemaker who will hop up and sing together with the band, or participate in one in every of the aforementioned sex scenes. Austin Butler’s Elvis experience suits him well to play one other handsome midcentury hero—of course Butler’s Cleven likes to chew on a toothpick while flying—even when 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 feel, 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 those 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 personality? You can just look up their name and see, on Wikipedia or the web site of the American Air Museum, how their war went. You can calm down, or, in some cases, you may prepare yourself for the inevitable. In Masters of the Air, for instance, Barry Keoghan, whose bad-luck pilot Curtis Biddick at all times seems to get the worst of it, will die before the war is over. (This is just not a spoiler! Sorry to Curtis Biddick!)

It’s this mixture of stress and certainty that’s at all times made the Spielberg/Hanks World War II shows paradoxically palatable. All war movies inevitably change into 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, amongst fliers and on the bottom, was value it—possibly 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 couple of minor characters wonder in the event that they are doing the correct thing before bombing town center of Münster, targeting railroad employees’ houses and places of worship. But Egan—one in every of our two centers of gravity, as viewers—thinks the Americans should “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 crucial decorated of the war, in addition to three Black fliers from the Tuskegee Airmen, as they’re shot down behind enemy lines. The Tuskegee men find yourself 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 ultimate episode. “They got it coming.”

These last episodes are stuffed with 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 ravenous 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 modified loads since 1945. But contained in the heads of Spielberg and Hanks, the whole lot stays red, white, and blue.