Is The Pacific Better Than Band of Brothers?
When Band of Brothers first aired on HBO on Sunday, September 9, 2001, close to 10 million people watched. Two days later came September 11, and HBO stopped marketing it. The ten episodes ran out on November 4 to half that audience, and the series then spent a quarter of a century being handed from one viewer to the next until it became the measure of every war drama since. This Wednesday, September 9, it turns 25.
HBO is marking the day with Band of Brothers: Legacy, a documentary premiering Wednesday, September 9 on HBO and HBO Max. It is directed by Chase Millsap, a former Green Beret, and executive produced by Tom Hanks, with new interviews from Damian Lewis, Ron Livingston, Michael Cudlitz, Dale Dye and David Schwimmer, plus never-before-seen archival footage and photographs of Easy Company. The same day, the HBO Max series page adds video diaries from Livingston and Richard Speight, alongside a curated "In the Company of Heroes" collection of documentaries and true-story titles.
An anniversary is a good excuse to rewatch, and a better excuse to settle the argument fans have at 1am. Hanks and Steven Spielberg followed Saving Private Ryan (1998) with three World War II series over 23 years, and the fandom treats the ranking as closed. All three go on the table before I agree, because the runner-up deserves a fairer hearing than it gets.
The one that follows a company
Band of Brothers runs ten episodes, built from Stephen E. Ambrose's 1992 book of the same name. It took 20 Emmy nominations and won seven, including Outstanding Miniseries. Its structural trick is the reason it still works: the protagonist is Easy Company itself. Lewis's Dick Winters is the spine and Livingston's Lewis Nixon its wry conscience, but the camera keeps getting handed to someone else, so by the last episode you know thirty faces the way you know a workplace. The cast list reads like a prophecy: Michael Fassbender, Tom Hardy, James McAvoy and Simon Pegg are all in there in supporting roles, before anyone knew their names.
The one that follows three men
The Pacific aired from March 14 to May 16, 2010, and also won the Emmy for Outstanding Miniseries. It draws on Marines' memoirs, mainly Eugene Sledge's With the Old Breed and Robert Leckie's Helmet for My Pillow, and follows three men: Leckie (James Badge Dale), Sledge (Joseph Mazzello) and John Basilone (Jon Seda). Rotten Tomatoes' consensus calls it "not for the faint of heart", and the standing complaint against it is a narrative more disjointed than its predecessor's. Both are true. The three leads barely share a frame, so the accumulating company feeling that makes the first series so rewatchable is gone by design. In exchange you get Sledge's arc, which is the most honest thing this whole cycle ever did: a gentle kid who goes to Peleliu and Okinawa and comes home someone else.
The one that leaves the ground
Masters of the Air ran nine episodes on Apple TV+ from January 26 to March 15, 2024, based on Donald L. Miller's 2007 book. It follows the 100th Bomb Group, a B-17 unit of the Eighth Air Force flying from eastern England, with Austin Butler as Gale "Buck" Cleven and Callum Turner as John "Bucky" Egan. It is the best-looking of the three and the thinnest. Reviewers praised the production design and knocked the thin characterisation and a CGI sky where the bombers looked "cartoonish". The deeper problem is that every mission resets the board: men fly, some do not come back, new men arrive. A bomber war is episodic by nature, and the show never finds a shape to fight that.
Verdict: the first one, and not out of habit
I am crowning Band of Brothers, but the fan default gets the reason wrong. It does not win because it came first, or because Winters is the most decent man ever put on television. It wins because it is the only one of the three in which time accumulates. Ten episodes of the same faces across the whole war means every loss lands on a person you have already spent hours with. The Pacific takes the bigger risks and spends its people too fast to build that debt. Masters of the Air never gets the chance. The order below is not close. But if you have two slots this week, the second one is the reason this piece exists.
Where Easy Company went
Damian Lewis played Henry VIII again in the 2024 sequel to Wolf Hall and voiced King George III in Ken Burns' 2025 series The American Revolution. Ron Livingston played Henry Allen in The Flash (2023), voiced Dr. Peter Waxman in the animated Pantheon and led three seasons of Loudermilk. Donnie Wahlberg carried Danny Reagan through Blue Bloods to its December 2024 finale and straight into the spin-off Boston Blue in fall 2025, while still touring with New Kids on the Block. Scott Grimes has voiced Steve Smith on American Dad! since 2005, 366 episodes and counting, and played Matty Bennett on Peacock's Ted. For more of the war they served in, on screen and on the page, see our World War II guide.
