Simon previews Spielberg/Hanks/HBO'S THE PACIFIC!!
While the world (including admittedly myself) has gone gaga over Glee, and no matter how many plaudits it will inevitably continue to pick up after it reconvenes after the infuriating mid-season break in April, 2010 will not be remembered as the year that saw TV musicals become hip again. Instead, it will rightly be remembered as the year that the team behind the astounding HBO mini-series Band of Brothers- Stephen Spielberg and Tom Hanks- returned to our screens with The Pacific. The HBO site offers the following synopsis of the mini-series:
The Pacific tracks the intertwined real-life stories of three US Marines Robert Leckie, John Basilone, and Eugene Sledge across the vast canvas of the Pacific Theatre during World War II. The mini-series follows these men and their fellow Marines from their first battle with the Japanese on Guadalcanal, through the rainforests of Cape Gloucester and the strongholds of Peleliu, across the bloody sands of Iwo Jima and through the horror of Okinawa, and finally to their triumphant but uneasy return home after V-J Day.If ever there were need to justify my excitement for this incredible looking mini-series, then here is the Super Bowl slot Band of Brothers remains the greatest mini-series to ever hit TV screens on either side of the Atlantic, and will continue to be while high-concept series with apparently short narrative possibilities are bloated into lengthy runs to appease fans and more importantly accountants. It was an astonishingly accomplished production, and could easily be considered more as a ten hour feature rather than the ten episodes it actually screened across.
The first thing that made Band of Brothers immediately brilliant were the casting decisions- the genius, but initially baffling choice of David Schwimmer as the vilified Captain Sobel stands out above all else: Schwimmers performance was far more subtle and measured than the sometimes cruel caricatures painted by the personal accounts of the surviving members of Easy Company in Stephen E. Ambroses excellent book. Crueller evaluations of Schwimmers performance have pointed out the lack of range that has hampered pretty much everything he has put his acting skills to in the aftermath of Friends (even crueller called it simple a grumpy Ross in a uniform), but the fact is, Schwimmer breaks his own pattern by committing a genuinely divisible character to screen without ever becoming pantomimey. And the fact that he lasts a fairly insignificant amount of screen time cements the worth of the casting decision- how easy it would have been for Hanks and Spielberg to choose one more notable or recognisable actor to drive the series (in the same vein that Joseph Fiennes is ostensibly helming Flash Forward from an acting level) and also to drive initial interest in the series. Instead Schwimmer, by far the most famous of an enormous cast appears in just three episodes as a prologue to the main development of Easy Company. Aside from Scwimmer, the cast was made up of largely unheralded actors- just familiar enough to inspire a spark of recognition, but not enough crucially to interfere with the audiences ability to grow with the actors as the characters developed. While based on the Band of Brothers book by Stephen E. Ambrose (I urge any history buffs to go out and read all of his books), the mini-series was further enriched by an endearing and at time heart-
wrenching set of interviews with the surviving members of Easy Company, whos first-hand accounts of their experiences added further intricate detail to the already wonderful testimonies given to Ambrose during his research. It is therefore extremely pleasing to see that The Pacific was borne out of a similar process- Hanks, Spielberg and Gary Goetzman- the comparatively unheralded third of the triumvirate- have exhaustively compiled information to once again offer a (hopefully) unrivalled set of personal accounts of the Pacific campaign. It was those personal interviews, segments of which were shown before and after each episode, that were one of the most affecting components of Band of Brothers. Particularly affecting was the final episode of Band of Brothers (Points), whose grand finale was a final selection of interviews with the real men of East Company, who until now had remained nameless. In those last few moments, after learning of the post-war fate of each surviving member of East Company, the interviewees are named, putting faces to the characters we have become so familiar with, and bringing the final dramatic hammer blow that reinforced the fact that these men lived through such astounding and affecting times. A genius construct in a truly fantastic production. Based in part upon the booksHelmet for My Pillow by Robert Leckie, With the Old Breed and China Marine by Eugene B. Sledge and Red Blood, Black Sand, by Chuck Tatum, The Pacific is once again further enriched by original interviews conducted with veterans and survivors, giving it the extra personal edge that made Band of Brothers more appealing. I cant help but hope that these interviews will in someway frame the events of The Pacific the same way they did in Band of Brothers. The marketing campaign behind Band of Brothers was strangely restrained in comparison to some of the more recent tent-pole TV releases, especially on this side of the Atlantic- a fact probably symptomatic of the somewhat controversial BBC2 airing slot which at once gave it greater artistic credence, but at the same time robbed it of a greater initial audience. One of the problems with current TV series, even including Glee and Flash Forward is that they are so high-concept- or more appropriately genre-specific as in the case of Glee- that they suffer when they are extended too far. 
