The Pacific on the History Channel

This is the first time I've known the History Channel to play The Pacific.

BoB will always be the superior series, but it's nice that people who may not have HBO will have the opportunity to check out the follow-up series.

The History Channel also had an interesting documentary on about World War II before the airing of The Pacific. I'm surprised that they've actually been showing a lot of history on the History Channel today instead of 50 Ancient Aliens and Swamp Pickers episodes. Not sure if this is an aberration or if they've decided to reverse course lately.

American Pickers would fit into the classic History Channel line-up, especially once they started to de-emphasize the scripted elements.

Pawn Stars would be nice if they didn't have Chumlee, the comedic foil goofball and eye-rolling scripted dialogue in the back office scenes.

Poor man's version of BoB. Not nearly as good. The writing especially got weaker.

Here is an oddity as reported by LSU alum Rod Dreher who grew up near Merrill Shelton (Snafu) in St Francisville and knew him and his family. He lived on hwy 61 and raised his family there. Later that home became the home of the Baton Rouge serial killer Derrick Todd Lee. Crazy.

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Band of Brothers vibe

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And people called me crazy when I said godfather 2 had a godfather vibe

I prefer the back stories of the items and the collectors on AP.

Never liked pawn stars....

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Which is why they should have chosen one of the three to focus on instead of focusing on all three

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The Pacific was an entirely different theater and was therefore not something easy to tell 1 units story. BoB set in Europe and with a unit that once it got to combat was engaged over the course of around a year in various "battles" it is set in mid 1944-May 45. The Pacific was telling the story of the Pacific War. Soldiers on Guadacanal fought a vastly different war then those in Iwo or Okinawa. None of the characters fought from early in the war until the ending battles. In reality the show is on par, as far as showing what the lives of soldiers were like. It obviously is not as deep and moving because it does not follow a unit from training until the end of the war for them. They could have made a fictional unit for the Pacific but no units in the Pacific would have been real to that story. I prefer they stayed accurate to real stories and did not go Hollywood.

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The Pacific was an entirely different theater and was therefore not something easy to tell 1 units story.

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The European Theater of Operations was an entirely different theater as well.

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The Pacific was telling the story of the Pacific War. Soldiers on Guadacanal fought a vastly different war then those in Iwo or Okinawa. None of the characters fought from early in the war until the ending battles.

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That's why it underwhelmed. It tried to do too much and should have focused on one unit the way Band of Brothers did. The ETO wasn't just western Europe. It encompassed North Africa, Sicily, Italy, southern France, and a few other lesser known places. The soldiers who fought in Easy Company during Bastogne had a far different experience from the soldiers of Patton's II Corps at El Guettar in Tunisia. Same thing with Easy Company's experiences in Normandy compared to those of the 7th Army at Monte Cassino in Italy.

We had been fighting in Europe since 1942 and yet we do not pick up the story of Easy Company until June 1944. You could have done the same thing with Eugene Sledge and his unit when they joined the war in September 1944. It also helps that the two battles Sledge fought in with the 1st Marines (Peleliu and Okinawa) were arguably the two worst battles of the Pacific War.