Michael S

From someone who read the source material, grew up building model WWII planes, had a great-uncle B-17 pilot, and obsessed over anything WWII aviation growing up, this show is an utter flop. My high hopes for the show were immediately dashed when the trailer was released. 60 seconds of which were close ups of Butler (or literally Elvis as a B-17 pilot) squinting and saying cheesy one-liners in his highly unauthentic growly, man voice. Sure enough, 3 episodes in, I'm just about done. Even during mission briefs the commander is squinting to look cool and everyone is lounging like it's some photo shoot. Perfect hair, the cap tilted to the side perfectly, ooo get a close up of Butler again! The show has hardly explained anything that's going on. The fight scenes are so sporadic and chaotic it's hard to tell who is who and what is happening. Fighter planes apparently flew as fast as jet planes as you can barely catch a glimpse of them. The Americans portrayed here are the worst stereotypes of their kind. Over confident, cocky, reckless, loud, obnoxious.. They couldn't even name the episodes. It's like they filmed it, saw how bad it was, and just pieced it together to get it out there. The opening theme is probably 3 minutes long (1.5 minutes of Butler close ups and everyone shirtless with perfect bodies, standing around the plane squinting) HBO must have known something and were smart to drop this stinky pile of garbage.