Dammit, the beach is crowded! I told you we should’ve left the house earlier!

HBO is sharing “The Pacific” for free online — but there’s a catch:

HBO has put Sunday’s first hour of its WWII mega-budget production “The Pacific” on its site. Don’t get used to it, though, the other nine hours will only air on HBO (until the DVD release, of course). [The Live Feed]

Wow, straight outta Drug Dealer Marketing 101: “Go ahead, man — first one’s free!” Users get a little taste of what “The Pacific’s” all about, then they call up their cable companies, desperate for an HBO fix. They’re predators, I tell you.

Anyway, the episode is available here after a quick and easy registration, and I obviously recommend watching it if you haven’t already. Or would you rather NOT see someone blown up by a grenade on a beach riddled with corpses, little Miss Fancypants?

Yes, the first episode of the “The Pacific” aired last night. It would be unreasonable to expect everyone to watch HBO every Sunday night, so I’m not going to bother with a recap and all of the untidy complications of plot and character development. Instead, I’m sharing Just the Badass Parts, including the all-new Warming Glow-trademarked JAP COUNT. That’s the number of times characters referred to the Japanese as “Japs.” Hooray, casual racism!

• OFFICIAL JAP COUNT: 18, plus an additional six in the scenes promoting the coming weeks.
• Chesty Puller, one of the world’s greatest all-time badasses, is a character in this show. APPROVE.
• Mutilated corpses.
• Featured: hiking through jungle with machine gun tripods. I can personally confirm that the tripods and spare barrels Marines carry for 7.62mm machine guns today are sheer misery to carry. The ones from WWII are twice the size.
• A wounded Japanese soldier receives aid from two Americans, then blows them up and commits suicide with a grenade.
• Beach littered with Japanese bodies after an all-night firefight.
• Marines play “Duck Hunt” with random Japanese soldier.
• A Marine stuffs cigarettes into his nostrils to keep smell of the dead at bay.`
• A Marine smokes while his festering wound gets dressed.

All of that made up for the painfully slow first half hour. Coming next week: more Guadalcanal! That means more malaria, more gore, more starvation, and heroism on Bloody Ridge that’ll make you piss your pants. Semper Fi!

I’ve got to leave the Internet a little early today to do actual talk-to-people work, so I leave you with the reminder that the first episode of “The Pacific” airs this Sunday at 9 p.m. Eastern. Above is the brand new trailer for the premiere, and once again: Chills. Goosebumps on my arms. The New York Times calls it “never less than spellbinding.”

Given that I’ve been excited for this miniseries for over a year now, there is nothing more important happening this weekend. People, if you don’t have HBO, break into someone’s house who does. If there’s a family there and they object to your presence, murder them with a Ka-Bar fighting knife. Then, after you’re done watching, torch the place with a flamethrower. It’s what the Devil Dogs of the 1st Marine Division (my old unit) would want you to do.

More weekend TV highlights and lowlights below.

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Bill Murray and Harold Ramis “cross the streams” in the classic WWII comedy Japbusters.

We are now only twelve days away from the debut of “The Pacific,” the Steven Spielberg- and Tom Hanks-produced HBO miniseries about love and flamethrowers that has been marketed as “Band of Brothers, but with Marines in the Pacific Theater of WWII.” It’s the most excited I’ve been about an HBO miniseries about Marines at war since… well, “Generation Kill.” I didn’t expect that comparison to be so recent.

Anyway, I recognize that some people don’t like reading reviews because it can shape their opinions, so if that’s the case, stop reading now. Everyone else, join me as I play air guitar to some highlighted sections of badassery.

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There isn’t a whole lot of meat to this story, but what I’m excited about most this morning is HBO’s announcement that “The Pacific” — the epic miniseries about Marines in World War II — has a premiere date. The ten-part series will debut on Sunday, March 14th and will be the most important thing in my life every week until May 16th. I’m spreading the word now so that you poor people who don’t have HBO can save up to pay for premium cable for two months. I mean, c’mon: Marines. Flamethrowers. Gratuitous use of the word “Jap.” You don’t want to miss that.

Now, I’ve posted both of the trailers before, but I understand that not everyone has been refreshing Warming Glow on the hour since June (people with “jobs,” whatever those are), so I’ve got them both below. If it doesn’t make you want to run a bayonet through Yamamoto and nail an Australian chick between campaigns, then you can just hang out alone with your vegan bran muffin, you goddam hippie communist queer.

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