Befitting its title, Masters of the Air is sublime when it’s in flight, staging several incredible combat sequences in an arena that’s holy in its beauty and ungodly in its capacity for death. At times, nothing but brilliant blue stretches out for miles around the armada of WWII bombers piloted by our protagonists; in others, there’s no room for anything but fire, bullets, and wreckage falling in every direction. That juxtaposition of carnage and resplendence runs through Masters of the Air, which maintains a schoolboy’s gaze for the miraculous wonder of flight. Unfortunately, when it turns that gaze to ground level, the series’ view of men at war becomes far less interesting and more treacly than that of its predecessors.
Based on Donald Miller’s 2006 book of the same name, Masters of the Air rounds out a triptych of TV megaprojects about American soldiers during World War II from executive producers Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg. After the two collaborated on Saving Private Ryan in 1998, they made the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers, which expanded on the brutal realism of that film to meditate on the cost of service and the imperfect relationships forged along the way. Premiering two days before 9/11 and now a pillar of the Dad Show canon, Band of Brothers walks the delicate line between dutiful paean to the 101st Airborne Division and something more complicated. Its style was old-fashioned even for the time, with a stoic patriotism contrasting the critical edge of the great Vietnam War movies, but it still managed a potent mix of maudlin and moving. Nearly a decade later, The Pacific reprised the project with sharper teeth, focusing on the Allied conflict with Japan with greater interest in both viscera and the Marines’ impulse to dehumanize their Asian enemy; they came off less as a band of brothers than as a band of misfits, ambivalent about the rules of engagement.
Little of that ambivalence is explored in Masters of the Air, which presents a war story with the frictionless sheen of any new Apple product. Premiering January 26 on Apple TV+, its nine episodes primarily follow the exploits of the U.S. Air Force’s 100th Bomb Group, whose pilots flew Boeing’s legendarily speedy B-17, or Flying Fortress, on bombing runs across Europe. The unit was famously accomplished and famously brutalized, nicknamed “the Bloody Hundredth†for its exceptional losses: By the war’s end, the 100th had lost 177 planes and more than 700 airmen. While Masters of the Air follows multiple characters throughout the show, its arguable leads are Majors Gale “Buck†Cleven (Austin Butler, pleasantly terrible doing an accent that sounds like Steve McQueen by way of Elvis) and John “Bucky†Egan (Callum Turner), with an ensemble that includes Nate Mann as dashing jazz enthusiast Major Robert “Rosie†Rosenthal; a reliably excellent Barry Keoghan as punch-happy Lieutenant Curtis Biddick; and Anthony Boyle as underdog navigator Harry Crosby, who serves as narrator throughout the series.
Masters of the Air is best in the opening stretch, which situates viewers into the rhythms and perils of life in the 100th. Being part of a bomb squadron is a uniquely terrifying proposition: in most cases, you are the very large, very specific thing every enemy plane intends to kill. With directorial duties split between Cary Joji Fukunaga (whose on-set behavior was the subject of troubling allegations), Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck, Dee Rees, and Tim Van Patten, the show is genuinely excellent when it’s evoking the intensity and claustrophobia that comes with being shoved into a metal pill and tasked with flying into enemy territory. Soaring above the clouds, the airmen may get shot, struck by shrapnel, burn alive, or simply fall out. And if they were to suffer the mixed fortune of escaping a nose-diving plane but land behind enemy lines, they must then contend with the possibility of capture, injury, hostile civilians, or simply being shot in the head. A standout sequence in the third episode illustrates the all-encompassing danger of a bombing run, as we follow the 100th getting devastated during a costly attack on Regensburg.
Soon, the unit’s dwindling ranks becomes a source of psychological stress for the airmen, and how they deal with being routinely sent out to their likely deaths is one of the most interesting things about the show. However, further exploration of that psychological stress gets cut short around the series’ midpoint, as Masters of Air repeatedly shifts focus to cover more narrative ground. Some time is spent on the French resistance, and later even more time is spent down in the doldrums of a POW camp. One episode breaks from the 100th’s perspective to explore the Tuskegee Airmen, featuring performances by Ncuti Gatwa, Branden Cook, and Josiah Cross. Directed by Rees, it’s one of the more compelling installments in Masters of the Air’s dramatically uneven back stretch, and the lone instance in which the aerial combat revolves around agile fighter planes as opposed to the hulking bombers. But its inclusion comes far too late, feeling more than a little tacked on.
That’s far from the show’s biggest problem, though, an honor that goes to a discernible lack of nuance that distinguishes it from its predecessors. The series eschews the lived-in realism of Band of Brothers and The Pacific in favor of a more stylized aesthetic that feels, at times, comic book-adjacent. Butler plays Cleven as such a throwback — his drawl has so much gravel in it you’d expect him to spit some out — that it’s hard not to see him as a caricature. Turner gets to do more as Egan, who struggles with drink and anger, but the character as written would still fit perfectly into the melodrama of Pearl Harbor. Meanwhile, the show merely nods at the thornier threads of the American wartime experience. In one scene, a German officer interrogating Richard Macon, one of the Tuskegee Airmen played by Josiah Cross, tries to bait the captured lieutenant by bringing up America’s segregation of Black people. “Why would you fight for a country that treats you like that?†asks the German. “Do you know any other country that’s better?†Macon replies. “I know it’s trying hard to become what it says it’s supposed to be. And when I get back, I’m going to help them do it a lot faster.â€
It’s a clap-line, a beat meant to be charged with the oomph of patriotism. But the moment glides over the complexities baked into the officer’s provocation, with the punch of Macon’s response diminished by the insufficient time spent getting to know him or any of his squadron-mates beyond their midair exploits. For all of this show’s thrills and technical glory in the skies, that scene is Masters of the Air in a nutshell: underbaked, uncomplicated, and determined to sail along the surface.