Bruce McKenna writes about what combat does to a handful of men, and he will not soften it. That instinct made him the right writer for Band of Brothers and the right creator for The Pacific, a programme we admire more readily than we enjoy.
Fi1m perspective
The first hour of The Pacific (2010) withholds nearly everything a viewer of Band of Brothers had been given. There is no single company to belong to, no roll-call of faces to learn, no warmth from the men's home towns. That was Bruce McKenna's decision as creator and principal writer, and it is the clearest statement of what he is for. He recalls Steven Spielberg's instruction on the project: 'We can never blink. It has to be really accurate in terms of how brutal the campaign was.' The series does not blink. For its first third it also does not let us in.
He came to television from journalism, having written on politics and foreign affairs after leaving a doctoral programme at Stanford, and the reporter's habits have stayed with him. His scripts are built from veterans' memoirs and first-hand accounts rather than from the standard histories. In 2001 he wrote three episodes of Band of Brothers: 'Replacements', 'Bastogne' and 'The Last Patrol'. Two years later Spielberg and Tom Hanks hired him to research and develop The Pacific, and he spent the rest of the decade on it, as creator, writer of seven of its ten episodes and co-executive producer. Since then there has been SIX (2017–2018), a series about Navy SEALs, and an adaptation of Rendezvous with Rama that has not yet been made.
What he does well is the personal cost. 'Bastogne' is the episode most often named when people talk about Band of Brothers, and it is the one that sits closest to what a fight does to the person in it. Our review of that series praised its patient attention to the men of Easy Company, and some of that patience is his. In The Pacific he spread the same attention across three Marines and the whole length of a war, from Guadalcanal in August 1942 onwards, and the strain shows. We spent three episodes unable to tell the men apart and were annoyed about it, because we knew how good the model was. Then, from the midpoint, we stopped minding, and by the end the men we had failed to distinguish had become people we could not look away from. It is a fine, punishing programme. It is not an easy one to love.
Critics have found little to hold against him; the coverage talks about accuracy and intensity and not much else. Our own reservation is that his method has a price, and The Pacific pays it up front. If you have only seen Band of Brothers, go in expecting less comfort and give it until episode five. It will be worth finding out what a writer who has spent his career on men at war does with a science fiction novel, should anyone let him make it.
Biography
Bruce C. McKenna is an American television and film writer. He wrote three episodes of the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers (2001): "Replacements", "Bastogne" and "The Last Patrol". His episode "Bastogne" received a Writers Guild of America Award, a Primetime Emmy nomination and a Humanitas Prize nomination.
McKenna served as creator, principal writer and co-executive producer of the 2010 HBO miniseries The Pacific, for which he wrote seven episodes. The series won eight Primetime Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Miniseries. He later contributed as writer and executive producer to the series SIX (2017).
Before entering television, McKenna worked as a journalist and freelance writer, with articles published in The National Review, The New York Times and other outlets. He is a 1984 Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Wesleyan University, where he majored in European history.
