If you’ve seen it again Band of brothers Often enough to recite the “Bastogne” episode by heart, the first thing you know is that you are not alone. Second, you’ve probably spent the last two decades waiting for another World War II series to have the same appeal and come away largely empty-handed. Master of the air tried. It did that too The liberator. Most of them landed somewhere between awesome and forgettable, too busy kneeling at the altar of the Greatest Generation to bother being interesting.
SAS: Rogue Heroes doesn’t have this problem. Steven Knights The two-season BBC series, which premiered in 2022 and is now streaming on Prime Video, tells the true story of how the British Special Air Service was invented in the middle of World War II by a collection of men who were absolutely terrible soldiers by most conventional military standards. David Stirling (Connor Swindells) was an aristocratic daydreamer who proposed the idea of a guerrilla commando unit while recovering in a hospital bed in Cairo. Paddy Mayne (Jack O’Connell) was an Irish rugby international with a temper so volcanic that the British Army didn’t know what to do with him. Together they recruited a force of drunks, thugs, poets and misfits, then convinced their chain of command to let them parachute behind Axis lines in North Africa and blow up airfields.
SAS: Rogue Heroes embraces the chaos of war
The first few missions are a mess. Parachutes don’t open. Intel is wrong. Men die in operations that were half-baked to begin with. But the SAS continues to deliver results, making it impossible to turn off and very easy to anger. Band of brothers earns its weight through the cohesion of the unit, the slow accumulation of shared suffering among fundamentally decent men. SAS: Rogue Heroes comes to a similar place but takes a completely different path. Knight built Peaky Blinders on the idea that style and substance are not competing interests, and he brings the same energy here. The drunken brawls in Cairo’s nightclubs get the same airtime as the raids in the desert. A fist fight between Mayne and a colleague takes place right next to a scene of men burning alive in their planes. That should ruin the show. That is not the case.
Swindells plays Stirling with a kind of benign ignorance that makes his confidence seem accidental. He doesn’t understand why people keep telling him no, and Swindells finds humor in this without making him a joke. O’Connell has the more difficult job. Mayne’s violence is real and frightening; His drinking would be clinical in any other context, and he is also the most effective commando the British military has ever produced. The series doesn’t try to explain him with a tragic backstory or keep him cozy between surgeries. O’Connell doesn’t do any of that. He allows Mayne to be downright unpleasant, which is exactly why when his loyalty or his grief finally breaks through.
“Rogue Heroes” doesn’t play by the “Band of Brothers” rules, and that’s the whole point
If you’ve spent time with the Shelby family, SAS: Rogue HeroesThe visual style will feel familiar. Knight uses anachronistic pinpricks, moves the camera as if he’s had a few drinks, and makes the North African desert look beautiful and alien in a way that fades into beige in most war dramas. But the style never overwhelms the effort. People die on this show and Knight doesn’t make it pretty. Season 2, released on Prime Video in January 2025, begins with the SAS in Italy and France as the war nears its end The total of 12 episodes in both seasons move at a pace that gives most prestige dramas the impression of the Ice Age. Knight has said he wants to take the story beyond the end of the war and follow the SAS into their post-war life, where the real story only gets wilder.
Comparison of the series with Band of brothers is inevitable and somewhat unfair to both shows. Steven Spielberg And Tom Hanks may have erected a monument, but Knight built something looser and stranger: a war story in which the protagonists are repeatedly reprimanded by their sideand no one, including them, can agree on whether what they are doing is brave or suicidal. If you’ve burned through every WWII series on every streamer and realized there’s nothing left, SAS: Rogue heroes should be a pleasant surprise.
SAS: Rogue Heroes
- Release date
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2022 – 00.00.2025
- network
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BBC One
- Directors
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Tom Shankland, Stephen Woolfenden
- writer
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Steven Knight
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Connor Swindells
David Stirling
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Jack O’Connell
Paddy Mayne
