There is a gripping moment in the first episode of PBS Masterpiece’s World on Fire where a young Polish soldier who joined the army to defend Danzig grabs a rifle and asks, “Can we hold them off until the British arrive?”
The commanding officer gives him a quizzical, almost knowing look and simply shrugs.
Everything about the beauty and power of the episode is conveyed in that shrug.
War stories don’t have to be noisy.
Shakespeare knew there was something so dramatically beautiful in the telling of ordinary stories. And some of the world’s best writers like Steinbeck, Dickens, Faulkner, and the Bronte sisters have found memorable and poetic stories in the ordinary. But so many of our TV stories about war tend to focus on the generals and heroes and people we’ve read about in the history texts of yesteryear facing monumental odds on particular battlefields.
World on Fire focuses on multiple locations in the first year of World War II–Poland, Germany, France, Britain, and the United States. Written and Produced by Peter Bowker (Blackpool, Occupation), the first episode weaves between ordinary families and yields extraordinary results.
It starts with a very Shakespearean opening. Like his great plays, where he opens with a hook to appease the groundlings–and then moves quickly into the deeper tragedy, the series opens with scene involving a 1939 Manchester protest rally that intrigues the audience while alerting us this is not our standard war story. But just four minutes later there’s a jarring visual scene set on the Poland-Germany border right before the title sequence, and from there we are captivated, completely drawn in.
We follow several families in episode one, and the subsequent episodes, but the focus of the first episode is a pacifist family in Manchester protesting the war: a father who sells anti-war papers, his fiery daughter Lois, and his trouble-maker son. We also meet a translator in Berlin working for the British who falls in love with a Polish waitress whose father and brother head to Danzig to hold off the Germans. And we discover an American reporter in Berlin, who is related to a doctor in Paris, who seems to be falling in love with an French-African jazz musician.
Most of the relationships have one thing in common: a sense of impending collapse, because the world is literally falling apart around them.
Nancy Campbell (Helen Hunt) is an American journalist reporting from Warsaw who sees early evidence of the German plan to attack Poland. Campbell implores her friend Harry Chase (Jonah Hauer-King), a translator, to leave the country before it’s too late.
That’s more complicated than it could be for Chase, since he is in love with both the Polish waitress Kasia (Zofia Wichlacz) in Warsaw and Lois (Julia Brown), a pacifist troublemaking protester by day and singer by night, back home in Manchester.
Hunt is compelling as a journalist and radio broadcaster here–she has the gravitas to portray a gritty character who has to constantly look over her shoulder but not look away from the news that encompasses her. Hauer-King’s Harry does very little translating in the episode. It’s a bit of a weakness that we barely see what he really does save a short and almost silly scene that was there to scream HE IS A TRANSLATOR, but he is otherwise quite capable of what looks to become the leading role in this miniseries as the episodes move on.
We also briefly meet Campbell’s nephew, Webster O’Connor (Brian J. Smith) who refuses to leave Paris despite his aunt’s warnings–because he is developing feelings for a jazz musician Albert (Parker Sawyers). This subplot was very limited but seems to be something we will focus on more as the German army moves towards France.
I found the scenes between Lois (Julia Brown) and her pacifist father Douglas (played by Sean Bean) to be particularly nuanced. Bean’s portrayal of a father still battling the demons of World War I and of losing his wife, and trying to raise two children to adulthood, is wonderful. Good writers show and don’t tell–and Bean and Brown help show the complexity of family. It’s 1939, but it may as well be today. There’s a timeless complexity but you feel that the father, daughter, and troubled son Tom (Ewan Mitchell) are family.
We can’t escape a few soapy elements. The “love triangle” that quickly forms is likely a necessary convention to create intrigue and help make sure it is more than a war story. I personally could have done without it, but I didn’t mind it. If we’re going to have a gripping war story, we may as well have relationship angst as well.
There are a few moments that are predictable and a shocking surprise or two. One even made me slightly emotional: a rarity. But how I know it’s great television is that even the predictable moments are executed in ways you still appreciate them and applaud them.
Like that Shakespearean tragedy where the prologue tells the story but the beauty is in how it plays out, we are introduced to wonderful characters in World on Fire. We want to protect them all. And we know most of them are marching to fates that are inescapable and as grim as the fall of Danzig.
At one point in the episode, Campbell, the American reporter, tells her British translator counterpart, “Make sure you do what’s right, not British.” Hopefully, TV audiences will do what’s right and watch episode one of World on Fire. And we have the British to thank for that.
World On Fire airs on Sundays from April 5th to May 17th on PBS from 9-10 Eastern / 8-9 Central.
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