From Slate Magazine · Rebecca Onion · · 3m
I don't rewatch TV. Band of Brothers got me.
A skeptic of rewatching sat down with Band of Brothers at 25 and found out why fans loop it every year.
In brief
A skeptic of rewatching sat down with Band of Brothers at 25 and found out why fans loop it every year. Band of Brothers rewards rewatching because it trusts you to do the work: the soldiers blur, the woods repeat, and the reward is learning the men one viewing at a time. Originally reported by Slate Magazine.
Two anniversaries at once
This week brought the 25th anniversary of Band of Brothers on HBO and a new hour-long documentary, Band of Brothers: Legacy, looking back at how the show got made.
The year HBO believed in itself
The same network year gave us Six Feet Under, Curb season two, Sopranos season three and Sex and the City season four. That "not TV, HBO" self-belief is all over the miniseries.
“this was the year the network debuted Six Feet Under”
Sincerity turned all the way up
There is heavy Spielberg and Hanks sentiment here. You will watch countless men grip hands and say "Good to see you," and you will be moved every time.
“you will also never feel so moved by the sight”
It trusts you to keep up
The show assumes you are leaning in, memorizing missions and following Dick Winters' orders as closely as his men do. That trust is the real hook.
The difficulty is the point
Most soldiers aren't played by stars, and episodes blur into fields, woods, rubble and brown-haired Americans in shredded uniforms. Fans call that a feature.
“You can watch BoB ten times and still be happily learning the names of the soldiers”
Once a year is amateur hour
Some fans rewatch annually as a ritual. On the show's subreddit, more than one reply scoffed that yearly viewing barely counts. One moderator started watching in 2001 and now watches with his grown son.
“sort of a golden era, before streaming rotted our brains”
The best source material wins
Easy Company were the Forrest Gumps of the European war: D-Day, Market Garden, the Bulge, the camps, Hitler's Berghof, V-E Day. That's why it beats The Pacific and Masters of the Air.
Four kinds of courage
Past the heroic music, the rewatch reveals range: Winters leading from the front, Speirs' frightening fearlessness, Buck Compton surviving mental collapse, and Sobel's unloved perfectionism.
Nobody needed rescuing
"Bastogne" ends with a title card saying Patton's Third Army relieved Easy Company, and that no man in it ever agreed they needed relief. The whole series builds to that line.
The documentary's real gift
Skip the colorized photos and boot camp stories. Keep the veterans: Carwood Lipton's combed white hair, Bull Randleman answering D-Day questions in single words.
“I was a 19-year-old paid killer. Don't forget that.”
A vanished kind of modesty
Every man of Easy Company has now died. After all the tributes and sequels, what they actually did still feels impossible to grasp. This year, the skeptic gets the ritual.
“This was a race of preposterously modest elderly men, now vanished from this earth”
The headline
Band of Brothers rewards rewatching because it trusts you to do the work: the soldiers blur, the woods repeat, and the reward is learning the men one viewing at a time.
