Frontline: American Porn (PBS)

Film Reviews | Regular Feature the camera as well. While the commitment ofSpielberg and Hanks to the series as executive producers seems genuine enough, neither played a hands-on role during every stage of production. Spielberg brought DreamWorks to the table, along with his own inestimable clout, and he was actively involved in casting and rounding up the top talent for the series - including a good many of his collaborators on Saving Private Ryan. But beyond that, Spielberg apparently provided little more to the actual series than his creative inspiration via the Ryan template. Hanks was far more engaged, co-scripting the premiere episode and directing the fifth. He was one of seven different writers and eight directors who worked on the series, and the only individual to both write and direct. Erik Bork, who co-scripted two episodes, also received credit as supervising producer, but there is no indication that he or anyone else exercised creative control of the series. In the vast majority of cases, quality hour-long drama series on television are "authored" by executive producers with a background in writing who are directly and intimately involved in every phase of production. These auteur producers supervise the writing, hire and fire the directors (often on a weekly basis, since directors are basically guns-for-hire in the television world), oversee the editing, and, crucially, monitor and shape the overall development of the narrative over the course of the series run. Spielberg himselfis keenly aware ofthis fact, because hisAmblin Productions employs auteur producers Michael Crichton and John Wells to do ER. HBO knows this as well, as David Chase of The Sopranos and Alan Ball of Six Feet Under can attest. But Band ofBrothers seems to have been created more on the principles of a military campaign than those of the prime-time television drama, with Spielberg as chief of staff but no one taking creative command of the project itself. McGrath underscores this view of the auteur producer in his piece on the prime-time novel, and he makes another critical point for our purposes as well. "TV, of late, has become much more of a writer's medium than either movies or Broadway," he writes, "which are more and more preoccupied with delivering spectacle of one kind or another." He goes on to suggest that this has happened "because of the very nature of the medium (spectacle doesn't show up well on the small screen, and it's too expensive anyway) and because of the almost accidental fact that the people who create and who produce most shows are also the people who write them, or else they're former writers." 5 Television screens are bigger today than when McGrath wrote that in 1995, but spectacle is still too big and too expensive for television - unless you have Spielberg and Tom Hanks and DreamWorks behind your $120 million project, and unless "it's not television, it's HBO." By series' end, the creative imperatives seemed to have been overwhelmed by the quest for spectacle and sheer scope of the campaign. Without a firmer hand on the creative controls and a sense of proportion better suited to the television medium, I can't shake the nagging feeling that the whole of Band ofBrothers is, finally, less than the sum of its parts. This is not to dismiss the series, however, which stands head and shoulders above the other WWII films Hollywood is currently turning out. Many of its parts, from individual episodes to the brilliant use of interviews throughout the series, are truly exceptional. The interviews alone, in fact, put Band of Brothers in a class by itself among WWII films, bringing reality and dramatic representation into a creative tension and symbiosis that is utterly unique and oddly compelling. While the series as a whole may lack the cumulative narrative through-line to qualify it for canonization, the testimony of those aged warriors of Easy Company creates an emotional cord that reaches from the ancient conflict of World War II to the terrorized warfare of the new millennium. And perhaps that's more than we have the right to ask of any war movie in this day...