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This week marked two special occasions in the robust Band of Brothersuniverse: the 25th anniversary of the show’s debut on HBO, and the release of a commemorative documentary, Band of Brothers: Legacy. It’s become part of the show’s origin story to note that the first episode ran two days before 9/11, but I also like to think about the fact that this was the year the network debuted Six Feet Under, and ran the second season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, the third season of the Sopranos, and the fourth season of Sex in the City.Watching Band of Brothersnow, you’re blasted with a feeling of high-grade sincerity—this is because of the subject matter, of course, but also because the HBO of the time all had that distinctive “not TV, HBO” quality of self-belief. There’s plenty of Spielbergian, Hanks-ish sentimentality in this miniseries—you will never watch so many men shake hands fervently and say “Good to see you” to one another as you do when watching Band of Brothers, and you will also never feel so moved by the sight. But there’s also a sense of trust between the show’s creators and its viewers. Hanks and Spielberg expect that you’ll be leaning in, remembering the details of missions, and following the directions Dick Winters (Damien Lewis) gives the men of Easy Company, as closely as the men themselves. Certain viewers of the series have done just that, watching and rewatching, their interest in World War II amplifying their intense fandom for these eight hours of television.
If you click into the Band of Brotherssection of the HBO app, you can now access not only the original show but The Pacific, Masters of the Air, and multiple extras, including the hour-long Band of Brothers: Legacy, a look back at the show’s making. Unfortunately for Band of Brothers: Legacy, I don’t want to see colorized historical photos, or hear actors talk about how their 10-day boot camp really made them feel like they were soldiers, how the show’s use of practical effects to actually explode trees brought them emotionally closer to the experience of being in combat, or how they see themselves as “a little through line” to the veterans of Easy Company—many of whom were alive in 2001, and all of whom have now passed away. What I wanted to do instead, and what many, many others often do, is rewatch the original.
In my opinion, life’s too short to rewatch TV shows. (You’re not going to get through all eight seasons of Outlanderwith that attitude.) But there are people out there who rewatch Band of Brothersas a yearly ritual. There are others who watch it much more than annually. (When I posted on the show’s subreddit looking to talk to people about this habit, more than one reply scoffed that “once a year” was amateur hour.) For this kind of viewer, the relative difficulty of Band of Brothers is a feature, not a bug. The show came out in “sort of a golden era, before streaming rotted our brains,” said a moderator of r/BandofBrothers, as we talked about how hard it can be to tell the soldiers of Easy Company, most of whom aren’t played by celebrities, apart from one another, and how long stretches of episodes look the same: fields, woods, bombed-out stone buildings, brown-haired Americans in increasingly tattered uniforms. “You can watch BoB ten times and still be happily learning the names of the soldiers,” wrote Ken Evans, another moderator and founder of the subreddit, in an email. (Ken watched the show as it came out, when his son was a baby—“my wife and I would watch it while taking care of him,” he wrote—and now sometimes gets his son to watch with him.)
I decided to rewatch this year, as a commemoration and an experiment. I’m far from the first person to observe that the story works so well—probably better than the show’s sequels, The Pacific(2010) and Masters of the Air (2024)—because it’s built on really good historical material. (Stephen Ambrose, who wrote the book the series is based on, knew how to pick them.) Easy Company, paratroopers in the 101st Airborne Division, were the Forrest Gumps of the last stretch of the war in Europe. Following them, you have a window on D-Day, Operation Market Garden, the Battle of the Bulge, the liberation of concentration camps, the taking of Hitler’s holiday home at the Berghof, and V-E Day.Band of Brothers tells you over and over, with its music and its narration, these are heroes. But on this rewatch, I picked up on the way the show’s characters more subtly demonstrate different kinds of fortitude: the from-the-front leadership of Lewis’ Dick Winters, the terrifying physical fearlessness of Ronald Speirs, Buck Compton’s persistence through severe symptoms of mental trauma, even the over-the-top perfectionism of the unpopular Herbert Sobel—played terrifically by a completely unsmiling David Schwimmer, then taking a break from Friends. The first time I watched, I laughed out loud at the end of the famous sixth episode, “Bastogne,” about the time the company spent surrounded, undersupplied, and freezing in the Belgian woods, when a closing title explains that they were relieved by General Patton’s Third Army, but none of the men of Easy Company ever agreed that they needed rescue. This time, I saw a little better how the rest of the series was building to this moment.
If you have to choose only one morsel of Band of Brothersfare, I vote you rewatch the show. But the documentary does have good parts: namely, the veterans. Frank John Hughes, the actor who played Bill Guarnere, describes the real Guarnere telling him while he was researching his role: “I was a 19-year-old paid killer. Don’t forget that.” And the documentary offers more footage of the veterans themselves, unseen stuff to add onto the filmed interviews used in the show and in the documentary that was released alongside the series back in 2001. Give me more of Carwood Lipton’s combed-back white hair, or the taciturn Denver “Bull” Randleman doling out one-word answers to the documentarians who are trying to get him to elaborate on how it felt to prepare to jump out of a plane on D-Day. This was a race of preposterously modest elderly men, now vanished from this earth; after all the hoopla, it still feels impossible to understand what they did. I don’t know if I’m going to become a yearly rewatcher, like the true Band of Brothers fans. But this year, I get it.
