Best World War II TV Shows

From the earliest days of World War II, filmmakers from around the globe were churning out entertainment centered around the conflict. These films from the early 1940s ran the gamut of dramatic, comedic, jingoistic, romantic, and thrilling, and they even sometimes featured Sherlock Holmes. But peace and the end of the fighting didn’t put an end to the art inspired by the war. By the late 1950s, the conflict had made its transition to television with series like Combat Sergeant, Navy Log, and The Twilight Zone using the war for memorable plots, and the medium was just getting started.

Like the movies that came before, the long-storied plethora of World War II shows can’t be defined by any one genre. Sure, there are combat-focused tales full of soldier camaraderie, valor on the battlefield, and traumatic loss, but there are also those shows that offer kitchen-sink drama, supernatural horror, and slapstick humor. With Masters of the Air, the latest high-budget war drama from the guys who brought you Band of Brothers and The Pacific, debuting today on Apple TV+, we’ve rounded up some of our favorite series that fall under this vast umbrella.

In addition to the European and Pacific Theaters, World War II also took place in the Twilight Zone. The series, which premiered less than a decade and a half after the fighting ended, had several episodes about the war. The original pilot for what would become The Twilight Zone (which is not streaming on any of the usual sites, unfortunately) is about a man trying to convince his therapist that his recurring dreams of being at Pearl Harbor right before the Japanese attack are more than just dreams. Later episodes, like “King Nine Will Not Return,” “Judgment Night,” and “The Encounter” have similar themes, exploring the lasting psychological effects of the war on those who fought it — and “Death’s Head Revisited” addresses the same issue from the other side when a former Nazi S.S. captain, who was part of the Holocaust, finally gets the inescapable punishment he deserves. Finally, “He’s Alive” is a devastating — if rewarding — critique of fascism about a small-time Nazi with big ambitions who learns from the best (meaning the worst) of them all. —James Grebey

A sitcom set in a Nazi POW camp is the textbook definition of “couldn’t get made today,” but the CBS show about American soldiers running a covert spy operation under the nose of their bumbling captors ran for a respectable six seasons starting in the mid-’60s. It goes without saying that the humor is pretty dated and leans toward the slapstick — at one point, a soldier dresses up like Hitler to distract the obsequious Colonel Klink (played by Jewish actor Werner Klemperer, whose family fled Germany in 1933) — but it’s a fun watch even if simply as a cultural relic of the halcyon days when Nazis were such an accepted evil that we made jokes about them on prime-time network television. —Emily Heller

Band of Brothers works on two levels. First, it’s a spared-no-expense war epic told over ten hours, with high attention paid to period detail, explosive action, and dozens of named characters based on real soldiers, many of whom warrant specific and memorable subplots. Second, it’s also among the finest documentary dramatizations ever made — with every episode accompanied by testimonials from the individuals who served in the war’s European theater, discussing their real-life experiences that informed the episode. So much of Band of Brothers feels real because, for these guys, it was. Most of the episodes focus on one character or another’s point of view, but the series as a whole emphasizes the conflict’s collective brutality. In the sixth episode, “Bastogne,” with Easy Company hunkered down in a frozen forest, medic Eugene Roe notices that fellow paratrooper Joseph Toye has lost his shoes and demands to know his shoe size to try to get them replaced. Toye replies, “Nine — just like everybody else.” —Eric Vilas-Boas

Nine years after the critically acclaimed run of Band of Brothers, Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg teamed up again to produce this companion HBO miniseries. Like Brothers, The Pacific draws many of its details from firsthand accounts, here using memoirs by former marines as source material. However, while the earlier HBO show focuses on one company of paratroopers in the Western Front, this series takes a wider view of the Pacific theater, following men serving in three different marine regiments as they battle both Imperial Japan and the challenges of surviving with limited resources on remote islands with unforgiving tropical climates. The end result is a more disjointed story that still manages to capture the complexities and humanity of the soldiers it depicts. —Tolly Wright

Based on Philip K. Dick’s speculative fiction novel, The Man in the High Castle answers the question posed by every freshman history major: What if the Allies lost World War II? The answer seems to be: a lot more weebs in San Francisco. In addition to providing a very timely exploration of what fascism in America could look like (the show premiered in 2015), it also stars some of the finest character actors television has to offer, including the king of resting villain face, Rufus Sewell, as an American-born SS officer, and Stephen Root as the titular man in the titular high castle. —E.H.

Sadly, the sophomore season of The Terror isn’t a hands-down horror masterpiece like the first season of the historical anthology series. But, despite falling short, season two is a chilling and, eventually, quite moving tale of legacy and identity as a group of Japanese Americans endure supernatural horrors and man-made ones once they’re placed in internment camps during World War II. George Takei, who lived in one of these camps as a child, co-stars. —J.G.

Though many of the shows on this list don’t shy away from the horrors of war, the stories still usually maintain that the sacrifices made by those soldiers are part of a bigger noble cause. In Catch-22’s biting satire, however, America’s stated enemy is rarely seen, and instead the biggest villains are the buffoons within the U.S. military. Airman John “YoYo” Yossarian (Christopher Abbott) just wants to make it out of the war alive, but his attempts to finish his tour and earn discharge are thwarted by absurd rules and circumstances. It’s a strong, if not entirely faithful, adaptation of Joseph Heller’s novel, but as Vulture critic Matt Zoller Seitz noted in his review, “It works better as a TV show than you might think, though not well enough to quell the feeling that we have yet to see an adaptation as scathing as the source material.” The show is helped along by its cast, which includes George Clooney, Kyle Chandler, and Hugh Laurie hamming it up as the ridiculous officer with little regard for the lives of the soldiers they command. —T.W.

If there’s one thing those folks over at Masterpiece know how to do, it’s historical dramas with excellent costumes and period details — and World on Fire is no exception. When the Germans invade Poland, the lives of ordinary people across Europe are forever altered: A Manchester factory worker (Julia Brown) sings for the troops; an American journalist in Berlin (Helen Hunt) tirelessly broadcasts the news from hostile territory; an English interpreter in Warsaw (Jonah Hauer-King) enlists in the British army; a waitress (Zofia Wichłacz) joins the Polish Resistance; and a gay American doctor in Paris finds love with a jazz musician. These stories, and others, intertwine to form a rich tapestry that leaves plenty of room for standout scenes from notable actors like Sean Bean and Lesley Manville. —T.W.

Like The Man in the High Castle, the premise of this HBO miniseries hinges on an alternate-history thought experiment: What if Franklin Roosevelt lost the 1940 presidential election to popular aviator (and noted xenophobe) Charles Lindbergh? The story unfolds from the perspective of a Jewish family living in New Jersey, whose lives are upheaved by the resulting rise in fascism and antisemitism. Based on Philip Roth’s 2004 novel of the same name, creators David Simon and Ed Burns risked perhaps being too timely with their adaptation — it debuted just eight months before the 2020 presidential election. Yet the gamble paid off. In Jen Chaney’s review for Vulture, she praised the series, writing, “To their credit, Simon and Burns, each of whom either wrote or co-wrote every episode, never get too heavy-handed in their attempts to make connections between the story they are telling and the Trump era.” —T.W.

“The guys” being executive producers Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, and Gary Goetzman.