by Billy Russell, Staff Writer

When something is successful, it’s impossible to leave it as a one-off. There’s too much money to be made. The irony of breaking the mold is that a new mold is created and there will then be clone after clone after clone of the successful thing that made the initial impact.

Saving Private Ryan is, by all accounts, a groundbreaking film. It broke all the rules about how war films are made and, as a result, its look and feel was copied endlessly: The 45 degree shutter, the washed out colors, the hyper realistic carnage. It was all too fresh, too new, and too wonderful not to steal from shamelessly.

Hot off the success of Saving Private Ryan, which was an immediate classic, winning over critics and audiences alike, Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks teamed up to make a sort-of sequel, a spiritual successor of sorts, to adapt Stephen Ambrose’s nonfiction account of Easy Company, Band of Brothers. The pitch must have been an easy sell: Saving Private Ryan, but longer, and based entirely on a true account, instead of just inspired by one. It would have the Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks names on promotional materials to draw in potential viewers. The series was eventually in production at HBO for ten episodes, with Hanks even directing one of them.

Band of Brothers is a rarity in that it is, in almost conceivable way, superior to Saving Private Ryan—no small feat. Saving Private Ryan is a marvelous movie, harrowing in its depiction of war. For something like twenty years, almost every action movie ripped off its aesthetic. Saving Private Ryan is a deserved classic, showing up on “best-of” lists, not just in terms of war films, but film in general.

But Band of Brothers? Band of Brothers is something else entirely. Instead of just looking at Saving Private Ryan and wondering, “How can we do that, but more?” the creative team decided to focus on what keeps viewers in their seats week after week: Human connection. Story. Characters we grow to know and love. Saving Private Ryan was a well-cast ensemble that brings humanity and warmth to the cold hell of war, but Band of Brothers made us feel like we actually know these soldiers.

Episode I sets the stage and introduces us to our cast of characters who comprise Easy Company of 101st Airborne in in WWII, paratroopers who land in behind enemy lines during battle. On the D-Day invasion, they disabled the large artillery guns that were shelling the beach landing. The cast is large and upon initial viewing, it’s easy get lost as to who’s who, but the show wisely focuses on a handful of main characters, while the dozens of others provide depth to the story.

Captain Winters (Damian Winters, no relation) leads Easy company through D-Day and Operation Market Garden and we see him grow and be promoted into leadership outside of his beloved company. He’s the closest thing the show gets to a main character. He’s the central focus on several episodes and those episodes are told from his point of view. His closest friend, who is his complete opposite, Captain Nixon (Ron Livingston) acts, strangely, as his conscience. Nixon is a drunk and a mess, and Winters can confide in him.

My personal favorite episode, “Bastogne” is told through the perspective of the company medic, Eugene Roe. Rather than focusing on battlefield heroics or strategy, the sole focus on this episode is the tragic loss of life and the weight it has on everyone involved. While most episodes boast a large body count, due to the massive nature of the battles depicted, “The Last Patrol” focuses on just one death, of a character we’ve never met before, and the show so successfully and brilliantly handles the gravity of it to show the contrast between the intimate dwellings the soldiers and occupy, versus the nearly-infinite hellscapes of bullets, tracers and mortar fire.

Band of Brothers looks and feels epic and at the time it was HBO’s most expensive production to date. You can feel the enormity of the budget just looking at it. The battles are huge and laden with explosions. Even though they reuse the same sets and redress them, there are whole villages portrayed in the action. A massive soundstage doubles as a snow-blanketed forest.

But the real strength in Band of Brothers is the comradery of the men serving. The line is spoken in the book and repeated in the series, is owed to Shakespeare:

From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember’d;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

Band of Brothers, which was created in the wake of Saving Private Ryan’s success has gone on to inspire its own successors: The Pacific and the upcoming Masters of the Air. The Pacific, which was also an HBO production is as epic and truthful to the horrors of war as Brothers, but its focus is different. It’s not merely a retread of where we’ve been before. The Pacific is more horrific, as it depicts the Marine Corps’ island warfare campaign. Little brotherhood was to be found in those episodes as each episode, week after week, shows a series of battles whose landscapes resemble Earth less and less and morph into something grotesque and alien.

None of the Band of Brothers’ brilliant production design or superb storytelling techniques would have meant a hill of beans if we didn’t care about what happened to these people. Through the course of ten episodes, we get to know them. We know their lives, we know what scares them, we know what drove them to volunteer to be paratroopers for the war effort. When we see their casualties, it hits harder.

Perhaps, also, the emotional resonance has to do with the fact that the show is well-researched and stays true to actual events. The show combines events, combines characters and truncates certain elements for the purpose of storytelling (and it flubs some facts in general, like mistakenly believing a very-much-alive member of Easy had perished), but each episode is introduced by the real men who served. They speak about the events about to unfold in an unwavering honesty. There’s no bravado, just a recollection of fear… and finding happiness in unlikely places, thanks to the men they enlisted with.