It’s rare I do this when I watch a show, but I had to keep pausing and texting a number of my friends about Masters of the Air (Friday 26 January, Apple TV+), because it felt important to let them know. “Have you heard of Masters of the Air?” I would say, and they would say no. And I’d type out – Austin Butler’s perfect face frozen mid-toothpick-chew on my screen – “It’s like Band of Brothers but in the sky. Go and watch the trailer now.” And exactly two minutes and 31 seconds later I would get the reply: “oh shit.” And then: “oh SHIT!”
It’s Masters of the Air week, then, and this is very exciting. It’s sort of like – how would I describe it? Like Band of Brothers, but in the sky. They got the old production team together – no-namers Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman – and got Cary Joji Fukunaga back where he belongs, which is directing all-timer episodes of TV. (He takes the helm for the first four episodes of this limited series – the man who gave us True Detective season one and all of Maniac! Back on TV!). They threw somewhere between $250m and $300m at it, which always works, and they assembled an unbelievable cast: Austin Butler, who you will remember from sending himself mad playing Elvis in a film that turned out to just be a music video, is one of the leads opposite Callum Turner, who is about to be the UK’s most Googled man. The rest of the cast list goes on for ever, so I won’t get to everyone, but you’ve got: Bel Powley, Anthony Boyle and Stephen Campbell Moore. You’ve got nepotism’s very own Raff Law and Sawyer Spielberg. And, due to a quirk of filming (Masters has been in production since 2012; it defected from HBO to Apple TV+ in 2019, becoming Apple Studios’ first in-house series; it was filmed, and delayed, and filmed again across 2021, dogged by Covid), it accidentally cast two of 2024’s ascendant stars, so Ncuti Gatwa is in, as is Barry Keoghan.
It’s Butler and Turner who dominate this one, though. It’s amazing that anyone just walks around looking like Austin Butler – he is magnetically good-looking, almost breathtakingly so, in an old-school gravity-absorbing way you thought they stopped making in the 50s – and he prowls around Masters of the Air, purring every line into Callum Turner’s ear. Butler plays Maj Gale “Buck” Clevan, and Turner is John “Bucky” Egan, and you think it would be really annoying that they have more-or-less the same name but it isn’t, not even once. It’s just astonishingly polished. The first episode lurches from a flirting-and-dancing and no-we-fly-out-in-the-morning, early-night-sir bar scene into rat-a-tat hold-your-breath action sequence so quickly it makes your head spin. And then you’re in, white knuckles throughout, each time any member of the 100th squadron takes off you feel a low clunk of dread.
Band of Brothers (land) and its sister series The Pacific (sea) did the same thing Masters of the Air (sky) is doing: costing a lot of money, having an impeccable cast, being very good, and, crucially, toeing a careful line. It does not glorify war but depicts how impossibly young men dealt with it, then shows the true violent horror in a series of visceral, genre-defining action scenes. In Masters, the action sequences are superb – you are on the outside of a bomber with an engine failing, or you are hanging out over clouds with nothing but a crackling window between you and oblivion, or you are watching Barry Keoghan and Austin Butler do a take-off check-list from the nose of the propeller (an oddly gripping scene: I’d probably watch these two read a phonebook at each other).
But it’s the human scenes in between that make you care about who does and doesn’t survive each mission, and they are done amazingly, too: not over-egged, never cloying, just guys being dudes, occasionally taking a sepia-tinged photo out of their pocket and looking at it, occasionally doing a really firm handshake instead of having an emotion, sometimes drinking a whisky after their best friend just died then slapping on a smile. Sales of aviator jackets are about to go through the roof, the most annoying man you know (me) is going to start saying “wilco” in polite conversation, and Masters of the Air is going to be 2024’s first series that you rewatch entirely before the year even ends.
