To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of its landmark World War II miniseries, Band of Brothers, HBO Max in 2021 released an 11-part rewatch podcast featuring interviews with actors, producers, and crew. This essay examines the way in which HBO Max, through the Band of Brothers Podcast, has leveraged fan practices of communal rewatching and discussion—a fan-based intimate public—in a way that not only celebrates the original text as a “ground-breaking-genre changing miniseries”, but also enhances the cultural capital of Band of Brothers as an authoritative interpretation of the American experience in World War II—and as a result, enhances brand equity for HBO Max as a corporate steward of national memory. We call this celebration a commemoration of memory: a self-justifying memorialization of a particular expression of cultural memory.
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