Emmy-winning True Detective and Maniac director Cary Joji Fukunaga is getting back into the world of top-tier prestige TV tonight, with Variety reporting that the Jane Eyre director—fresh off shooting the latest James Bond film, No Time To Die, currently stuck in a Hollywood holding pattern—has signed on to produce and direct multiple episodes of Steven Spielberg’s Masters Of The Air. The follow-up to 2010's HBO miniseries The Pacific, the show will act as the third installment of Spielberg’s wider Band Of Brothers universe of shows, dramatizing the battles on land, sea, and now air in World War II.
Unlike the previous two installments of the series, Masters Of The Air will run on Apple TV+, one of a series of high-profile acquisitions the service has carved out for itself in recent years. (Meanwhile, our perverse minds pine for the universe where Spielberg’s pals at Quibi scored this particular coup instead—at last, a globe-spanning conflict suitable for the viewer on the go!) Fukunaga will direct the first three episodes of the series, which covers the last two years of aerial fighting in the European theater of the war, pulling from Donald L. Miller’s book of the same name.
As Variety notes, Fukunaga is also reportedly in talks for a wider first-look deal at Apple. Although he’s only really worked on three shows—True Detective, Maniac, and production and writing duties on TNT’s The Alienist—his track record is solid enough at this point that it’s not terribly surprising to see the always-talent-hungry Apple willing to drop some cash to keep him in the fold.