Masters, but not commanders?

'Masters of the Air' disappoints, plus 'Sort Of,' 'Reacher,' and 'True Detective'

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I explain that you’re not asking the right question…

Hanks and Spielberg go back to WWII... again

As discussed around the time I turned 50, I had old man pop culture tastes long before I actually became an old man. So it will shock none of you, even if you haven’t been reading me for very long, to learn that I’ve long been a sucker for the various Tom Hanks-produced period miniseries about manly men doing manly things, like From the Earth to the Moon, The Pacific, and, especially, Band of Brothers. I rewatch Band, in full or in part, every few years, and did retro recaps of each episode back in 2009 on the original What’s Alan Watching? site. It’s an imperfect show, because the sheer amount of similar-looking characters means it takes until around the halfway point for everything to really work. But once it starts working, it is Dad TV so pure and uncut that of course it’s addictive.

This week, Hanks and Steven Spielberg have their third TV team-up (Spielberg didn’t work on From the Earth to the Moon), with the launch of Masters of the Air. Though they’ve moved from HBO to Apple TV+, and though this one focuses on bombardier crews rather than soldiers on the ground, in broad strokes it’s what you’ve come to expect from the two of them and all their returning collaborators: epic scale, deep sincerity, lots of inspirational moments and other tugs at your heartstrings, etc. The only way it could be more precision-targeted at me would be if it somehow co-starred Dennis Franz as a crusty but lovable old general overseeing the 100th Bomb Group.

Unfortunately, as I discussed at length in my Rolling Stone review, I don’t think Masters works nearly as well as its predecessors. The Band problem of too many characters is exacerbated here by everyone wearing oxygen masks and skull caps on the bombing mission, so it’s almost impossible to tell who is under fire in any given moment of the otherwise-stunning battle sequences. And even when we can see everyone’s faces, the characterization is paper-thin for almost everybody. Callum Turner (who already did the mid-century thing well recently in The Boys in the Boat) comes off the best, but that’s more from his performance than what he’s given to play. Parts gave me the requisite chills, but not enough, and I found myself growing more frustrated the longer I watched, rather than less. Masters is just trying to do too much — like awkwardly shoehorning in a few Tuskegee Airmen in the last couple of episodes — to give any particular character or story idea the proper attention. (As one of the Tuskegee pilots, poor Ncuti Gatwa barely has any lines, much less a real character to play.)  

Masters is probably more rewatchable than The Pacific, which I have never gone back to a second time because it’s so raw. But The Pacific had incredible highs in terms of emotion and spectacle that Masters struggles to pull off nearly as well.

Odds and/or ends

• Lost in the shuffle of a pretty busy month of premieres, the Canadian dramedy Sort Of returned to Max last week for its third and final season. I really like this show, starring Bilal Baig (who also co-created it) as a gender-fluid Torontonian struggling to find equilibrium with their family, their friends, and the family they sometimes work for as a nanny. I wrote about it when Season Two came to Max, and I’ve watched screeners of all of this season’s episodes. It’s a satisfying ending to a very small, idiosyncratic, extremely warm and empathetic series. Highly recommend.

• I tapped out on a couple of this week’s notable debuts after two episodes apiece. Amazon’s Expats struck me as glum misery porn, which is unfortunately becoming Nicole Kidman’s TV niche. (As someone who really liked Lulu Wang’s The Farewell, it was disappointing to have this as her big television debut.) And Netflix’s Griselda came across as a competently made but fairly generic drug cartel story. (I also was never hugely into Narcos, which has some overlap with Griselda in behind-the-scenes personnel.) For deeper thoughts from people who actually watched them in their entirety, I highly recommend Linda Holmes’ takedown of Expats, and Dan Fienberg’s review of Griselda.

• In my recap of True Detective: Night Country’s second episode, I wrote about how Issa López is leaning harder into the hints of the supernatural than Nic Pizzolatto ever did in his three seasons. It can be tricky when a show asks how much of what’s happening has a rational explanation, and how much is otherworldly. I much prefer the version of Yellowjackets where the girls are suffering from a shared mental breakdown over their awful circumstances to the one where the evil spirits are real. But with Night Country so far, I think López has the balance exactly right. Plus, Christopher Eccleston is back on HBO on Sunday nights, which is the time and place where, on The Leftovers, he delivered one of the greatest closing line of any TV episode ever made:

When bigger isn’t better

A couple of months ago, I said that I gave up on Reacher Season Two after the premiere didn’t thrill me anymore than the first season had. But I am also a person who is highly susceptible to FOMO, and also someone who periodically needs a binge they don’t have to give their full attention to while getting other things done. So after friends like Brian Grubb wouldn’t stop talking and posting about Season Two, I finally put on the remaining episodes in stray moments over the last few weeks. It didn’t convert me, but it clarified a couple of thoughts I had about the show.

The first is that seeing Reacher surrounded by his old Army buddies this season brought my objections to Alan Ritchson into sharper focus. Yes, he has the size that Tom Cruise so badly lacked in those movies. But he lacks basically everything else that makes Reacher a special character. His version of the character doesn’t seem like he has a brilliant investigative mind. He’s also too jokey and too emotionally vulnerable, especially around his friends. The whole deal of the character is that he’s like a figure out of myth, not just in his stature, but in his genius, his stoicism, and his whole demeanor. (Cruise had all the other stuff; he was just short.) When TV Reacher defends his hobo lifestyle, it always comes across as a gag, rather than something he fervently believes in. He’s just… a guy, who happens to be really, really, really big.

But the other thing I realized in going through the rest of the season is that the Reacher producers have put a lot of thought into all the things they can have a man this large do to his enemies. And I enjoy that level of creative brutality — like, say, Reacher kicking a car hard enough to trigger the airbag and injure its driver — enough that I’ll at least consider it again as a laundry-folder whenever the third season pops up.  

That’s it for this week! What does everybody else think?