You rang? https://disqus.com/home/discussion/avclub/sam_waterston_will_be_the_quietly_stern_sam_waterston_type_in_aaron_sorkins_hbo_pilot/

That comment thread should be recognised by Congress as culturally significant.

I prefer the episode that played out in the comments here.

And Basalone felt like such a cypher. Almost the point of being propagandistic, the way he seeks combat, wins medals, ultimately dies in battle. And Leckie was miscast. I never bought James Badge Dale as a marine, he was too nebeshy. I dare say, even Joseph Mazello I didn’t really get into as Eugene Sledge.

It was hurt because its three separate books awkwardly jammed together. Basalone never meets Sledge and so forth which makes it feel a tad more disconnected then Band of Brothers. It’s still a grand series but trying to do three storylines instead of just adapting With the Old Breed was a bad call.

I think its because the Pacific was a costly financial failure and Zaslav is even more of a penny pincher.  There loss.

HBO lost a ton of money producing The Pacific.

There is an excellent video on YouTube detailing how it didn’t make nearly as much money with home media sales as Band of Brothers. The Pacific cost more to produce and ended up being barely profitable. I understand why HBO was apprehensive about another WWII series with an even higher budget.

Portrayals of fighting in the Pacific remind me a lot of WWI trench warfare, just brutal and disgusting with a lot of close contact. Plus the Japanese weren’t above straight murdering prisoners of war if they became a hassle. There’s an excellent movie from the mid-2000's called The Great Raid that was about a…

How did HBO let this one go?

The fact that both shows emphasised different aspects of war probably also made a difference.

BoB was about literally that. A group of men and their path to Germany. The Pacific seemed less about the War itself and more about the damage done both physically and even more so mentally on those who fought it.

BoB is…

KINJA blows

For BoB, the reason why it works and the Pacific doesn’t kind of goes back to the origin story.

Yup, I’d absolutely watch this if it was on HBO/Max like the previous two Spielberg/Hanks-produced WWII miniseries, but I’m not paying for AppleTV+ just for one thing.

I loved both series. I would highly recommend the books both are based off of. The books for the pacific highlight more of the racial animosity that fueled the pacific war more than the European war.  

Yeah I have the same thing, I love to revisit BoB, but the Pacific was just one and done for me, and I don’t know why.  Maybe the cast?  I don’t find the actors in The Pacific nearly as compelling.  And perhaps the miniseries is harmed by the fact that the Pacific theater was such a different beast.  BoB was in a…

I rewatch BoB every time it’s on (except I often skip The Breaking Point because it’s just too fucking hard to watch). I’ve rewatched some of The Pacific, but it’s too bloody and harrowing throughout to really want to sit down and see again. I’m looking forward to this one, though it sounds stressful. Also I need to…

it would’ve been fine as a limited series. i liked season 1 and thought it didn’t need to go further but i’m not going to complain about michelle gomez joining season 2.

I wonder if there’s a sliding scale of likeness rights — it kind of looks like Harrison Ford, but not exactly like Harrison Ford.

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