18 years ago, the real sequel to HBO’s Band of Brothers aired on the very same network. Band of Brothers is arguably one of the great miniseries of all time. It’s a moving, thrilling series, filled with talented actors in front of the camera and talented creatives working behind it in almost every role.
As one of the totemic modern dramatizations of World War II, every war TV series that has come after it has to be compared against it. Sometimes this is a natural comparison, as many of the great modern war shows of the 21st century, The Pacific and Master of the Air, come from the Tom Hanks-Steven Spielberg-Gary Goetzman team behind Band of Brothers.
While those two WWII shows have a lot in common with Band of Brothers, BOB‘s true sequel is set in a different time, a different war, and comes from another formidable creative team. Generation Kill is Band of Brothers‘ true successor series. The seven-episode show is based on Evan Wright’s 2004 book of the same name, crafted from his articles originally written for Rolling Stone.
The series follows the soldiers in the U.S. Marine Corps’ 1st Reconnaissance Battalion during the first phase of the Iraq War, taking place between March and April 2003. Lee Tergen plays reporter Evan Wright (though the character is never referred to by name), who is embedded within the battalion.
David Simon, one of the secret master showrunners of the 21st century, created the series with Wright and Ed Burns, Simon’s frequent collaborator who worked on The Wire, The Plot Against America, and We Own This City. The bland, boring trudge through the desert looks nothing like the heroic fight through Europe, but Generation Kill and Band of Brothers have more in common than you may initially guess.
Generation Kill Is More Like Band Of Brothers Than Any Show That’s Come After
The Pacific and Masters of the Air may be thrown up first when discussing Band of Brothers successor shows, but Generation Kill is more like the 2001 hit than any other series. What Generation Kill and Band of Brothers do is take a huge conflict and narrow it down to one group of people.
In both series, we (mostly) follow just one battalion. In Generation Kill, it’s the 1st Recon, and in Band of Brothers it’s the 2nd Airborne. By sticking with one group, following individual soldiers from the beginning of the conflict to the end, we get a sense of what these wars do to the people involved.
They are not day-to-day documentaries about the history of World War II or the Iraq War; they are war stories brought down to the personal level. By sitting with the same group of soldiers, we learn more about the war than we would if the shows were wider in scope. Critically, in both series, what we learn about war is not good.
Generation Kill is aptly named, particularly when comparing it to Band of Brothers. The men of Easy Company, real people, remember, were called the Greatest Generation. So if the Greatest Generation comprised the men who fought in World War II, what do you call the men who fought in a much different conflict, like the Iraq War, where the lines between the good guys and the bad guys weren’t quite so black-and-white?
Band of Brothers hints at this evolution of the complexity of warfare, with many sobering moments in a show that was always careful to avoid jingoistic hero-worship. While the fight against the Nazis was righteous, scenes of women being shaved and humiliated in the Netherlands or Liebgott (Ross McCall) killing a German he’s “pretty” sure was a commander of a Concentration Camp paint a more complex picture of warfare and its effects, one Generation Kill is happy to investigate.
The Pacific Is Too Different Of A Show To Be Band Of Brothers’ Successor
The other choice for the successor to Band of Brothers is usually The Pacific, a companion series with a similar episode style and made by many of the same people behind Band of Brothers. The Pacific is too different a show, however, to call it Band of Brothers‘ true successor.
Though both shows follow theaters of the war during World War II, The Pacific has a different scope, tone, and rhythm to it. It’s a fantastic series, but not in the same register as Band of Brothers. The Pacific follows multiple regiments of the 1st Marine Division, all fighting in the Pacific Theater.
While this does allow us to hop around the theater to a greater extent than we would by just following one regiment, it also makes the characters feel more disconnected. The Pacific shows the real cost of such a brutal war, following a character until their death, only to hop to the next. The battles keep going, leaving plenty of bodies behind.
It’s a much more grim series than Band of Brothers as well, mirroring the slow, painful, danger-around-every-corner feeling of jungle fighting in the Pacific. There’s a gallows humor present in Band of Brothers and Generation Kill that you won’t find in The Pacific, making it an excellent, but much more punishing watch.
Generation Kill Is One Of The Greatest War TV Shows Of All Time
Even without the lineage of Band of Brothers, Generation Kill is one of the greatest war TV shows of all time. No other series presents such an honest look at one of the defining conflicts of the early 21st century. Generation Kill presents an endless march in the desert, going from one destroyed town to the next and back.
Orders are missed, soldiers get on each other’s nerves, and camps are established, taken down, and put back up. This is not the parachute into Normandy. It almost seems boring, and the soldiers, played by Alexander Skarsgård and James Ransone, seem more likely to punch one another than take on an enemy.
Then there’s a brief moment of chaos, and you see how close the Marines are to the edge, and even they don’t realize it until they’re in a firefight. Generation Kill combines the mundanity of a job with the terror of war for something instantly recognizable but also frighteningly alien. It’s an examination of modern America as much as Band of Brothers is an examination of a lauded past America, and both shows offer surprising insights into the accepted fiction of those worlds.
- Release Date
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2008 – 2008
- Network
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HBO
- Directors
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Simon Cellan Jones