Television Review

Like many members of the Spielbergian generation, I grew up in a time when children spent their summer days roaming. Carrying canteens and old canvas satchels, we were inevitably on the run, mostly from Nazis, though occasionally from aliens. We dashed through cornfields, set booby traps in the woods, hid in trembling, sweaty groups behind trees and punched twitchy younger siblings to keep them from giggling. We bent branches into bows, sharpened sticks into spears with our pen knives, ate mint and blackberries and roots we told ourselves were sassafras and tried to build campfires with no matches.

It was inevitable after the popular and critical success of their 2001 World War II miniseries "Band of Brothers," which told the story of the drive to conquer Hitler and Mussolini, that executive producers Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg would return to finish the job. "The Pacific," which tells the story of the war against Japan, is here -- it begins Sunday on HBO -- and is its forerunner's equal in emotive strength, weird poetry and technical bravura;...

The participation of Martin Scorsese as an executive producer and the director of its pilot episode would make HBO's big new "Boardwalk Empire" — which premieres Sunday — an event, regardless of whether it were any good. (As it happens, it is good, though perhaps not great; cable shows make their meaning known slowly, and even the six episodes I've seen seem too few to know.) Scorsese is not the first famous director of Filmland to have worked on the small screen, but among his generation he is the weightiest, and the pairing of the maker of "Goodfellas" and "Casino" with a writer from "The Sopranos" — Terence Winter, that series' busiest writer after its creator, David Chase — would seem as natural as that of spaghetti and meatballs.