Masters of the Air (new WWII AppleTV series) [SPOILERS]

[Corvinus85]

The latest episode disappointed me in that it didn't follow through on the setup of the previous episode - the Allies' plan to destroy the Luftwaffe prior to the invasion to secure air superiority. It strongly implied that the bombers were going to continue to have a tough time as they were going to be the bait while the P-51s would destroy the enemy. Instead it skips to D-Day, and even that is quickly glossed over. We never really saw D-Day from aviators' perspective in other media afaik. A missed opportunity here. The only good P-51 action was the 4 Red Tails going against ground targets in southern France. 

[DireWolfSpirit]

I loved the pilots spontaneous out loud laughter when the mission director advised the Tuskegee Airmen to try and blend in with the local Germans when they run out of fuel.

[Relic]

5 minutes ago, DireWolfSpirit said:

I loved the pilots spontaneous out loud laughter when the mission director advised the Tuskegee Airmen to try and blend in with the local Germans when they run out of fuel.

It was in France, but yeah, that was probably the funniest bit out of the entire show. There HAVE been a bunch of missed opportunities, but I've mostly enjoyed this series. 

[Ran]

I'm a little sad that we haven't glimpsed a Me 262 so far. This show definitely has the same problem of The Pacific, in that the story is so split-up, so it's not just following one group of guys through the whole of the war. But it's very competently done, and some of the air battle sequences have been pretty bracing.

[dbunting]

I have actually enjoyed the last couple episodes more, not because they're better but I just couldn't stand the actors from the first episodes. But yes, the fracturing of the story makes the series not hold the weight like BOB had, I doubt BOB will ever be matched. If they had chosen to follow a single squadron we may have gotten more of that feel but since they are supposed to be showing all of the Masters of Air to us that family feel gets lost.

The POW camp part seems like a waste on a show called Master of Air, just my opinion. I understand it was a big part of the experience for fliers but I feel like if they spent all the time being used on the POW camps back in the air it would be a better show. More focus on the fighters and bombers and any new techniques they did to turn the tide and win the war.

[Werthead]

I wonder if it's a budget consideration: doing stuff in the planes is very expensive, doing stuff on one set in the camp for three episodes (and I suspect reuse of some of the airbase sets, redressed) is a lot cheaper.

Clearly the show isn't cheap, but I'm not getting the sense it had anything like the money spent on The Pacific or even, in its day, Band of Brothers.

[Tongue Stuck to Wall]

2 hours ago, Werthead said:

I wonder if it's a budget consideration: doing stuff in the planes is very expensive, doing stuff on one set in the camp for three episodes (and I suspect reuse of some of the airbase sets, redressed) is a lot cheaper.

Clearly the show isn't cheap, but I'm not getting the sense it had anything like the money spent on The Pacific or even, in its day, Band of Brothers.

Wert, I was wondering the same thing so I did a bit of research on the budgets for each of the series. Here are the results adjusted for inflation:

Band of Brothers - $125 million in 2001 dollars = $225 million in 2024 

The Pacific - $200 million 2010 = $350 million(!) 2024

Masters of the Air - reported $250 million

So Masters does indeed have a healthy enough budget based on the other series, but it is for sure conceivable the focus on the POW camps in the last episodes could be due somewhat to financial constraints.  That said, I think it's worthwhile to consider also:

-By 1944 there weren't that many more "dramatic" missions episode-worthy of which the Schweinfurt/Regensburg and Munster missions weren't already representative;

- It's a good opportunity to balance out the relative lack of characterization in the earlier episodes.  Cleven and Egan are of course still two of the main characters so this gives us an opportunity to follow their stories further;

- The series is also trying to be somewhat faithful to Miller's book, and he does devote a considerable amount of the last chapters to the source historical account to the Kriegies overall and their experiences.

As DBunting alludes to above, the source material for each of the series has definitely been progressively more difficult to adapt successfully. BoB had the discrete focus on Easy Company, The Pacific on Basilone, Leckie and Sledge, but Masters is a massively sprawling comprehensive history of the air war in Europe.  When I first read it, I was surprised the 100th Bomb Group features only sporadically (maybe 5%?) in the entire work; the rest of it deals with other Bomb Groups and squadrons and the strategic planners and decision makers such as Arnold, et al.

I can appreciate for the challenges faced by the showrunners and script-writers of Masters: trying to introduce engaging and memorable characters while adhering to the source material in presenting a realistically-told story.  Not an easy row to hoe by any means.

Edited March 13 by Tongue Stuck to Wall

[hauberk]

3 hours ago, Werthead said:

I wonder if it's a budget consideration: doing stuff in the planes is very expensive, doing stuff on one set in the camp for three episodes (and I suspect reuse of some of the airbase sets, redressed) is a lot cheaper.

Clearly the show isn't cheap, but I'm not getting the sense it had anything like the money spent on The Pacific or even, in its day, Band of Brothers.

I think that it's less budget and more story development.  More flight time also means more face blindness for the actors - who are all dressed the same and wearing oxygen masks.  Moreover, it's also going to very much be the same action each time.  If the intent of the series is to address a specific group of people's experience in the Bloody 100th, all of the other stuff that they have been showing is super relevant.  Also worth noting that this seems to have been supplemented by Harry Crosby's book A Wing and A Prayer.

That said, completing eliminating anything to do with why they shuttled to Africa before returning to Thorpe-Abbott would maybe have helped.  I had initially assumed that they were staging for Operation Torch, but that does not seem to be true.  Likewise, perhaps a little more about D-Day might have been nice, including acknowledging, that by and large the preparatory bombing of the beaches was a massive failure with the bombs being dropped behind the German defenses to avoid dropping to close to the Allied landing forces.

It's also possible that Orloff had a bit too much influence this time around.

My guess is that an air war story about fighter pilots may have lent itself to more of the in air storytelling.  As a sidenote, it appears that there was an entire section of the Pacific that was originally supposed to follow some Dauntless torpedo bombers.  Covered in detail in the Pacific Companion by Hugh Ambrose.

 

 

[Corvinus85]

A strong finale. While overall, it wasn't as good as Band of Brothers (nothing is though), I enjoyed the show. 

[Werthead]

Pretty solid finale.

Rosie was a fucking lunatic though. Flew 52 missions (twice a normal tour), he was shot down twice. They completely cut the first time out of the show on the presumed basis that viewers wouldn't believe it: he was knocked unconscious and the plane nose-dived into the ground. Insanely, he was pulled alive from the cockpit by the Free French and clandestinely flown over the Channel at night. The next time he woke up after the crash was in a hospital in Oxford, feeling very confused. He was assigned desk duty but pointblank refused to take it and returned to his old squadron.

During the mission where he was shot down in the finale, one of the bombs he dropped probably directly hit the "People's Court" in Berlin, instantly killing Roland Freisler, one of the Third Reich's more notorious total shitheels.

As the concluding card noted, he served as a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials and interrogated Goring personally.

I think it was a great show, better than The Pacific but not as great as Band of Brothers.

[dbunting]

I think it ended ok. For me it's way below BOB and even The Pacific. 

The scene where the flyers needed parachutes and door was locked seemed very contrived and forced, it may be true to life but it didn't feel like it.

It feels like the black fighter pilots were thrown in for the sake of diversity and to show fighter pilots. They got one episode and after that they were back ground props. I know now that this was based off a book(memoirs?) written by a person in the 100th so adding the fighter squadron almost feels like a mistake? IDK how to express what I am thinking on this, it seems like the show would have been better served if it stayed on that core group.

While I was watching  it and Rosie went on his tour of Europe and comes across the concentration camp, my first thought was here is the obligatory camp horror sequence that these movies all show. Then when I saw after the episode that he served as a prosecutor it hit me a little different. I really think they messed up not showing us more about these guys before each episode like BOB brothers did. Had I known he eventually did that, the scene in Poland would have come across much differently.

[Corvinus85]

3 hours ago, dbunting said:

The scene where the flyers needed parachutes and door was locked seemed very contrived and forced, it may be true to life but it didn't feel like it.

Which scene was that? I would think the doors need to be locked to not open at the wrong time by accident.

3 hours ago, dbunting said:

It feels like the black fighter pilots were thrown in for the sake of diversity and to show fighter pilots. They got one episode and after that they were back ground props. I know now that this was based off a book(memoirs?) written by a person in the 100th so adding the fighter squadron almost feels like a mistake? IDK how to express what I am thinking on this, it seems like the show would have been better served if it stayed on that core group.

They certainly weren't used the best way. Maybe if we had seen a mission where they provided escort to the bombers (even if not the 100th), it would have been better. It was Crosby who wrote a book that the show used, hence why he is the narrator.

3 hours ago, dbunting said:

While I was watching  it and Rosie went on his tour of Europe and comes across the concentration camp, my first thought was here is the obligatory camp horror sequence that these movies all show. Then when I saw after the episode that he served as a prosecutor it hit me a little different. I really think they messed up not showing us more about these guys before each episode like BOB brothers did. Had I known he eventually did that, the scene in Poland would have come across much differently.

I do agree that it would have been nice if this show had followed the BOB format of having interviews with veterans at the beginning of each episode, but recall that in BOB they only revealed their names at the very end, probably to keep the tension up for the audience (I suspect most viewers were unfamiliar with the individuals that were part of E Co, and the same can be said of these fliers). So telling you before the final episode that Rosie becomes a prosecutor for the Nuremberg trials wouldn't have worked. And the show did specifically establish from the beginning he was Jewish, and that explained his drive to keep fighting. So I think the death camp scene still hit appropriately and you could say that him seeing that is what made him become a prosecutor. (I have no idea if it's true that he saw that camp then before the war ended). 

[Ran]

3 hours ago, Corvinus85 said:

I would think the doors need to be locked to not open at the wrong time by accident.

This was referring to the scene with Croz and crew not being able to get their gear when they were supposed to be wheels up in a few minutes, and he kicked in the door so they could get at it. Then he went and shoved the guy who was in charge of the equipment into his food in front of everyone. Think that was the previous episode.

I definitely think that I would have gone with splitting time for the whole show between the 100th and the Tuskegee Airmen, and then having them finally meet up as they did when they were introduced, finally given P-51s to fly.

Edited March 19 by Ran

[hauberk]

3 hours ago, Corvinus85 said:

They certainly weren't used the best way. Maybe if we had seen a mission where they provided escort to the bombers (even if not the 100th), it would have been better. It was Crosby who wrote a book that the show used, hence why he is the narrator.

They did.  During the previous episode when they were getting the long range fighter cover, the redtails where visible as a part of the fighter escort.  There was no dialog pointing it out (like the Band of Brothers leg bag for instance), but they were present on escort duty.

[Corvinus85]

4 minutes ago, hauberk said:

They did.  During the previous episode when they were getting the long range fighter cover, the redtails where visible as a part of the fighter escort.  There was no dialog pointing it out (like the Band of Brothers leg bag for instance), but they were present on escort duty.

I guess that would have been the better episode to introduce some of the fliers.

[hauberk]

1 minute ago, Corvinus85 said:

I guess that would have been the better episode to introduce some of the fliers.

No disagreement.

[Werthead]

2 hours ago, hauberk said:

They did.  During the previous episode when they were getting the long range fighter cover, the redtails where visible as a part of the fighter escort.  There was no dialog pointing it out (like the Band of Brothers leg bag for instance), but they were present on escort duty.

I don't think that was the Red Tails. They were operating out of Italy as their main engagement in Europe, and I don't think they ever flew alongside the bombers we've been following (some of the historical accuracy crowd were moaning about that). Certainly they noted the arrival of the Mustangs which allowed them to accompany the bombers all the way to Berlin and back though.

Edited March 19 by Werthead

[hauberk]

18 minutes ago, Werthead said:

I don't think that was the Red Tails. They were operating out of Italy as their main engagement in Europe, and I don't think they ever flew alongside the bombers we've been following (some of the historical accuracy crowd were moaning about that). Certainly they noted the arrival of the Mustangs which allowed them to accompany the bombers all the way to Berlin and back though.

I’ll go back and look again but my recollection is that we saw P-51s with the distinctive tail markings scream past the bombers. 

[hauberk]

2 hours ago, Werthead said:

I don't think that was the Red Tails. They were operating out of Italy as their main engagement in Europe, and I don't think they ever flew alongside the bombers we've been following (some of the historical accuracy crowd were moaning about that). Certainly they noted the arrival of the Mustangs which allowed them to accompany the bombers all the way to Berlin and back though.

Went back and reviewed ep 7. Exterior shot during voiceover shows mustangs with red noses and maybe silver tails. Interior shot looking out navigator?) red tail flies past. It’s quick, but it’s there. 

[Werthead]

2 minutes ago, hauberk said:

Went back and reviewed ep 7. Exterior shot during voiceover shows mustangs with red noses and maybe silver tails. Interior shot looking out navigator?) red tail flies past. It’s quick, but it’s there. 

I looked this up. The Red Tails (332nd Fighter Group) were based exclusively in Italy and flew escort for the 12th Air Group. They never flew out of England or France, and never escorted the Mighty 8th (the 100th Bomb Group).

The red-tailed Mustangs must have been from another unit.

Edited March 19 by Werthead