If you could produce a big budget HBO series, what would it be about?

[Eddie Teach]

Troll suggestion?

Turtledove's Worldwar series.

That could be ok with decent screenwriters capable of making distinct characters.

[CountDeMoney]

Turtledove's Worldwar series.

That could be ok with decent screenwriters capable of making distinct characters.

In other words, not the Turtledove Worldwar series.

[Eddie Teach]

I like the concept of meshing historical fiction and alien invasion but nobody's really done it well. Cowboys and Aliens was just bad. Worldwar has promise but it's not really developed enough. It's like he sat down one night and brainstormed what the invasion might entail and then left it at that. I could forgive the lack of characterization if the world itself was fleshed out.

[Drakken]

I'm baffled that with the popularity of Band of Brothers and The Pacific, no big-ass WWII series was made on the Eastern Front.

I'd produce a 10-episode HBO serie extravaganza on the Eastern Front, from Barbarossa to Berlin, following a rag-tag crew of Germans wehrmacht go apeshit and die for the Fatherland, then go another 10-episodes following a rag-tag of Russian guards go apeshit and die for the Motherland. Obviously, nothing would be spared for the audience, and I mean nothing. I'd go all Darkness Induced Audience Apathy on them because if there was a place in which war was Hell on earth it was in Russia.

[Drakken]

It's like Game of Thrones in the real world, just without any likable characters and much more grim misery.

Wallenstein and Tilly were likeable sort of chaps... for the time.

[Razgovory]

I'm baffled that with the popularity of Band of Brothers and The Pacific, no big-ass WWII series was made on the Eastern Front.

I'd produce a 10-episode HBO serie extravaganza on the Eastern Front, from Barbarossa to Berlin, following a rag-tag crew of Germans wehrmacht go apeshit and die for the Fatherland, then go another 10-episodes following a rag-tag of Russian guards go apeshit and die for the Motherland. Obviously, nothing would be spared for the audience, and I mean nothing. I'd go all Darkness Induced Audience Apathy on their eyes because if there was a place where war was hell on earth it was in Russia.

Yeah, nobody wants to watch abunch of Russians.

[Drakken]

Yeah, nobody wants to watch abunch of Russians.

Russians and Euroweenies like to watch a bunch of Russians carpet-maul Nazis.

I'd give Elena Vaenga a cameo, too.

[Razgovory]

Do you guys even get  HBO?  Anyway, you guys don't like a war film unless every surviving soldier turns into an emo wrist-slasher to demonstrate "WAR NEVER SOLVES ANYTHING".

[Zanza]

It's like Game of Thrones in the real world, just without any likable characters and much more grim misery.

Wallenstein and Tilly were likeable sort of chaps... for the time.

Tilly was responsible for the Sack of Magdeburg, the biggest atrocity in a war full of them. Wallenstein brought the principle that war feeds itself to a new heights and looted whatever he could, making war perpetual.

[Drakken]

Tilly was responsible for the Sack of Magdeburg, the biggest atrocity in a war full of them. Wallenstein brought the principle that war feeds itself to a new heights and looted whatever he could, making war perpetual.

I know all this. Besides, Tilly is not responsible for the sack of Madgeburg, he lost control of his troops inside the fallen city because they hadn't been payed for a long while and Magdeburg was rich.

Like no TV series or movie has ever scripted a premodern, killing machine of a warlord under a sympathetic or emotionally complex light before, just for the sake of the narrative...

[Baron von Schtinkenbutt]

Tilly was responsible for the Sack of Magdeburg, the biggest atrocity in a war full of them. Wallenstein brought the principle that war feeds itself to a new heights and looted whatever he could, making war perpetual.

I know all this. Besides, Tilly is not responsible for the sack of Madgeburg, he lost control of his troops inside the fallen city because they hadn't been payed for a long while and Magdeburg was rich.

Command responsibility.

Anyway, my second idea for a series would be Battletech, starting just before the Fourth Succession War in 3028.  No Clan shit.

[Drakken]

Command responsibility.

Ex post facto law. In fact, sacking a city who had refused to surrender was the norm back then. Magdeburg not only vehemently refused to surrender, but was one of the focal points of Protestant resistance to the Emperor.

Also, Tilly (and almost all commanders of the TYW) was commanding mercenaries, whose day-to-day life in between battles was to plunder the countryside for money and food, which meant torturing, raping, and murdering. Principles of later-century national armies and Geneva conventions cannot be retroactively used when one is commanding a bunch of scorchers who can turn on you if you don't pay them or don't allow them to loot and rape. Only the bible-thumping, gung-go Swedish king succeeded in maintaining heavy-ass discipline, and even then the Swedish army was also including a lot of mercenaries - themselves plundering.

[Queequeg]

Russian Revolution, from 1905 to the death of the NEP.  Maybe 6 seasons. 

[Zanza]

Ex post facto law. In fact, sacking a city who had refused to surrender was the norm back then. Magdeburg not only vehemently refused to surrender, but was one of the focal points of Protestant resistance to the Emperor.

Also, Tilly (and almost all commanders of the TYW) was commanding mercenaries, whose day-to-day life in between battles was to plunder the countryside for money and food, which meant torturing, raping, and murdering. Principles of later-century national armies and Geneva conventions cannot be retroactively used when one is commanding a bunch of scorchers who can turn on you if you don't pay them or don't allow them to loot and rape. Only the bible-thumping, gung-go Swedish king succeeded in maintaining heavy-ass discipline, and even then the Swedish army was also including a lot of mercenaries - themselves plundering.

The sack of Magdeburg was infamous at its time and people of the times certainly lamented the utter depravity of the mercenary armies. So even by the standards of the time, the Thirty Years War and its atrocities were considered damnable. 

[Viking]

Ex post facto law. In fact, sacking a city who had refused to surrender was the norm back then. Magdeburg not only vehemently refused to surrender, but was one of the focal points of Protestant resistance to the Emperor.

Also, Tilly (and almost all commanders of the TYW) was commanding mercenaries, whose day-to-day life in between battles was to plunder the countryside for money and food, which meant torturing, raping, and murdering. Principles of later-century national armies and Geneva conventions cannot be retroactively used when one is commanding a bunch of scorchers who can turn on you if you don't pay them or don't allow them to loot and rape. Only the bible-thumping, gung-go Swedish king succeeded in maintaining heavy-ass discipline, and even then the Swedish army was also including a lot of mercenaries - themselves plundering.

The sack of Magdeburg was infamous at its time and people of the times certainly lamented the utter depravity of the mercenary armies. So even by the standards of the time, the Thirty Years War and its atrocities were considered damnable.

Think of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, infamous today as torture centers.. though, they are certainly the least bad of places where torture does happen. Magdeburg was a propagandistic tool for mobilizing protestants not because the brutality of the sack but rather that it's fall represented a crisis for the protestant princes who were in danger of losing the whole war at the time. It's not a case of OMG THE HUMANITY!!!!!1111oneoneone, it was more like Shit, were losing, we need to mobilize the base.