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I'm Stephen Metcalf, and this is the Slate Culture Gab Fest. This is event programming, dammit, edition.

This is also the daily podcast from Slate.com for Wednesday, March 17th, 2010. On today's program, the HBO event program, there's that word again, the Pacific,

the trade rag variety fires its staff critics and mommy bloggers in a snit.

Joining me today are Slate's foreign editor, June Thomas. June, welcome.

Thank you, Steve.

I should say you're sitting in for Julia, who's away this week. And our film critic, of course, Dana Stevens. Hey, Dana. Hey, Stephen. Great to see you both. I should say right off the bat that every non-venereal virus is now represented in this room. Currently, Dana, you're sick. June, you're sick. I'm sick in spirit. Let's dive right in. June, the word event jumps out at one once you start noticing it everywhere when television is being heavily pimped for by marketing departments. Movies are described as events. The reason why, I mean, and this is that we should say there's a new HBO television

series called The Pacific, which is the equivalent of Band of Brothers, of course, but only

in the Pacific theater fighting the Japanese.

It's brought to us by Stevens Spielberg and Tom Hanks as executive producers.

It's enormously expensive, unfurled with an enormous amount of pomp, and its first episode premiered on Sunday.

And what I thought was so funny is they started it with a little documentary teaser, which I thought was utterly gripping.

And in it they interview some greatest generation survivors of the marine assaults in the Pacific Island, one of whom

says we had no idea this was an important event.

The main thing was to stay alive.

There's an immense lack of pretense and self-consciousness about the language and attitude

of these men looking back on their experience.

To compensate for this, Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks have made The Pacific.

Yes.

...