THE PACIFIC - first 8 episodes

 If you are a man then you know that Band of Brothers is quite possibly the greatest TV series ever filmed. If you don't think that, well just pull on your tampon string for a bit and allow me a moment of internet-based reverence... It even had Ross from friends in it, playing an absolute arse, and still managed to turn in 10 hours of pure cinematic-quality war-gold. It's inevitable that The Pacific is going to held up to this ludicrously high standard, and after the first 8 hours...reign in your expectations a wee bit men. It's good, very good...but...not truly great. At least...not yet.

Bad points? The first 4 episodes are just disappointing. Early on...some night-based combat where you can see F**K ALL. It  rains. A lot. They get bad bladders and worse feet. An entire episode where the soldiers go on leave. They have a few drinks and get some sugar from the local lasses. All well and good but this is about WAR. Watching soldiers courting and enjoying a bit of craic is like watching a porno where after some minor foreplay the fluffer and the stud wander off set for some mixed bean salad while the boobenomically enhanced star who had previously been tentatively gobbling crank has a quick game of Fruit Mystery on her lube-flecked iphone. BoB managed to build character and develop relationships without ever leaving the theatre of combat. But when The Pacific finally hits its strides around episode 5 it throws its cast into a hellish combat-based cement mixer that makes most of BoB look like a rather genteel pensioners' disagreement about lawn-bowling.

The ferocious and little-known battle for Pelieu is where things start to get really nasty. The body count is immense, the marine vs japanese warfare is truly medieval at times. And each episode just gets better and better, leading up to a seemingly restrained episode 8, which concentrates on an almost forgotten earlier character...and ends up by throwing him into a jaw-dropping 10-15 minute abbatoir-like battle sequence based on the landings on Iwo Jima. The final two episodes will deal with the biggest battle of the entire pacific war at Okinawa...it looks incredible. If only it hadnt started off so comparitively weakly - but perhaps it was the escalating scale of the war in the pacific itself that gave it that particular narrative direction...so if you start watching it, don't bail after the first few episodes, it gets infinitely better, and you can flick pebbles into my exposed brain and roast me with a flamethrower if that aint so.