Television: Back To The Beachhead

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Brothers hides behind its verisimilitude as if it were a bunker, as if the fact that a scene actually happened means you can't call it a cliche. No doubt soldiers in WW II really did hand out chocolate bars to grateful kids, pass pictures of their gals back home around the trenches, get wounded and tell their comrades to go on without them and save themselves. But these scenes add little to our understanding after we've seen them in scores of war movies. And the few efforts to put the story in context fall flat: Easy liberates a concentration camp in the ninth episode, called Why We Fight, a self-serving title that misleadingly implies that America entered the war to save the Jews of Europe.

In the end, Brothers seems too handcuffed by its desire to honor its real-life subjects--many of whom consulted with the actors and contributed interviews that introduce each episode--to tell us anything new or daring about war. Re-creating the horror of battle takes more than crafty camera work, special effects or even an honest-to-God true story. It means inspiring the fear that you could die at any instant, vicariously, through strong characters you are invested in. The premise of Brothers is that war created a bond among the men of Easy that an outsider could never truly appreciate. For all its technical proficiency, this mini-series, alas, proves that point.