Forget 'Band of Brothers,' This Explosive 12-Episode WWII Epic Is the Perfect Replacement

Published Sep 6, 2026, 7:27 PM EDT Jessica is a journalist, editor, TCA critic, and multimedia storyteller with a decade of experience covering pop culture, film, TV, women's sports, lifestyle, and more. She earned her degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington with a focus in creative writing before moving to N.Y.C. and getting her start at The Huffington Post. (She still misses those nap pods.) She's covered multiple film festivals, recapped some of your favorite series, worked too many red carpets to count, and even yapped on a podcast or two. When she’s not interviewing your favorite showrunner or ranking Ryan Gosling's best roles for places like UPROXX, Teen Vogue, Marie Claire, The Daily Beast, and Cosmopolitan, she’s busy being a full-time hype woman to her cat, Finn. You can find her on Bluesky and, sadly, Twitter. If you've rewatched Band of Brothers enough times to recite the "Bastogne" episode from memory, first of all, you're not alone. Second, you've probably spent the last two decades waiting for another WWII series to scratch that same itch and come up mostly empty. Masters of the Air tried. So did The Liberator. Most of them landed somewhere between reverent and forgettable, too busy genuflecting at the altar of the Greatest Generation to bother being interesting. SAS: Rogue Heroes does not have that problem. Steven Knight's 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, by most conventional military metrics, absolutely terrible soldiers. David Stirling (Connor Swindells) was an aristocratic daydreamer who pitched the idea of a guerrilla commando unit while recovering in a Cairo hospital bed. Paddy Mayne (Jack O'Connell) was an Irish rugby international with a temper so volcanic that the British Army couldn't figure out what to do with him. Together, they recruited a squad of drunks, brawlers, 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 early 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 keeps getting results, which makes them impossible to shut down and very easy to resent. Band of Brothers earns its weight through unit cohesion, the slow accumulation of shared suffering among fundamentally decent men. SAS: Rogue Heroes gets somewhere similar but takes a wildly different route. Knight built Peaky Blinders on the idea that style and substance aren't competing interests, and he brings that same energy here. The drunken brawls in Cairo nightclubs get the same screen time as the desert raids. A fistfight between Mayne and a fellow officer sits right next to a scene where men are burning alive in their planes. That should sink the show. It doesn't. Swindells plays Stirling with a kind of benign obliviousness that makes his confidence feel accidental. He doesn’t understand why people keep telling him no, and Swindells finds the comedy in that without turning him into a joke. O'Connell has the harder job. Mayne's violence is real and frightening; his drinking would be clinical in any other context, and he also happens to be the most effective commando the British military ever produced. The show doesn't try to explain him away with a tragic backstory or make him cuddly between operations. O'Connell doesn't sand any of that down. He lets Mayne be flat-out unpleasant, and that's exactly why it cuts when his loyalty or his grief finally breaks through. 'Rogue Heroes' Doesn't Play by 'Band of Brothers' Rules, and That's the Whole Point Image via BBC If you spent any time with the Shelby family, SAS: Rogue Heroes' visual style will feel familiar. Knight uses anachronistic needle drops, moves the camera like it's had a couple of drinks, and lets the North African desert look gorgeous and alien in ways that most war dramas flatten into beige. But the style never drowns out the stakes. People die in this show, and Knight doesn't make it pretty. Season 2, which dropped on Prime Video in January 2025, picks up with the SAS in Italy and France as the war grinds toward its conclusion, and the 12 total episodes across both seasons move at a clip that makes most prestige dramas feel glacial. Knight has said he wants to take the story past the end of the war, following the SAS into its postwar life, where the real history only gets wilder. Comparing the series to Band of Brothers is inevitable and a little unfair to both shows. Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks may have built a monument, but Knight built something looser and stranger: a war story where the protagonists keep getting reprimanded by their own side, and nobody, including them, can agree on whether what they're doing is brave or suicidal. If you've burned through every WWII series on every streamer and figured there was nothing left, SAS: Rogue Heroes should be a happy surprise. SAS: Rogue Heroes Release Date 2022 - 2025-00-00 Network BBC One Cast Connor Swindells David Stirling Jack O'Connell Paddy Mayne