Sheer terror. You’ll feel it in your bones as the young men of America’s 100th Bomb Group — nicknamed the “Bloody Hundredth” for the heavy losses they suffered — fly raids into Nazi territory in the action-packed true story, Masters of the Air.
At the center are two best friends, dashing Major Gale “Buck” Cleven (Austin Butler) and mischievous Major John “Bucky” Egan (Callum Turner). “Buck and Bucky are both romantics who grew up dreaming of flying planes,” says John Orloff, who adapted the script for the nine-episode limited series from Donald L. Miller’s book of the same name. “That’s why they each joined the Army Air Corps in 1940, 18 months before America entered the war. It wasn’t to be soldiers. It was to fly planes. But the war slowly changes them, taking them from being boy-men to men.”
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It’s familiar territory for Orloff, co-writer of the lauded WWII limited series Band of Brothers. Here he reunites with the award-winning team of Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, and Gary Goetzman, who produced that and The Pacific. Like those projects, Orloff says, this one covers “how experiences in war forge brotherhoods, whether they’re made in foxholes or shared in the freezing confines of a B-17, 25,000 feet in the air.”
That feeling extended to preparation for the massive scale of the shoot. The actors went through boot camp training, learning the basics of flying and operating in an immersive B-17 fuselage set on a moving gimbal.
In the series, the friends face Nazi fire and the oxygen deprivation and frigid temperatures of the era’s high-altitude attacks, before landing back in England. “They would go on a terrifying mission and then spend the night back at base, maybe dancing with a local girl,” Orloff says, noting the familiar truth that conflict makes you grow up faster. “Buck and Bucky are not romantics by the end of the war. And their friendship changes in the process. It deepens and matures as they do.”
Masters of the Air, Series Premiere, Friday, January 26, Apple TV+
This story originally appeared on TV Insider
