A lot of technical firepower that went into what I consider at best mediocre military history. And considering the fact that it was to present armor warfare from the "bottom of the fishbowl" it was lacking in impact. I can't possibly go into specifics but here are some general points:
1. What are usually described are bits and pieces of skirmishes that were part of much larger conflicts. The problem is that it gives the viewer the impression that armor warfare was a kind of joust or duel. (Several of the aerial combat shows suffer the same problem.) What's lost is that tanks were expected to play several roles in any given engagement and shooting at other tanks was probably the least common.
2. Crucial weapons are given little consideration. Mines were a serious enemy to tank movement at any time. Before any of those jousts took place there's a good chance somebody's combat engineers was looking for mine fields or, if they weren't, that you'd find them by having tracks blown off - or worse. It is very likely that most tanks were killed by anti-tank guns. There were tons of them and because they were so easy to hide were a dreadful menace. It was a rare day where tanks showed themselves for any extended periods: if they did, they would be vulnerable from fire attack by standard artillery. HE might not kill a tank (although a direct hit probably would - it certainly would if the shell was a large one) it could easily damage them. When in an engagement this put a huge premium on holding onto the field. If you lost ground, you lost the ability to recover tanks, so on a bad day a damaged tank was as dead as a dead one. In some battlefields the individual anti-tank weapon was changing the rules in a very serious way. (The success in the late war of the Panzerfaust and Panzerschreckt, not to mention our own bazooka, led many post 1945 officers to question the viability of the tank in a future war. Korea solved that question.) And airpower of course. Here, I'm glad that the producers didn't turn armored combat into Private Ryan. Allied airpower was a crucial advantage but not because they killed large numbers of tanks. Rather because they could have killed large numbers of tanks (and anything else that moved) if given the targets. Constriction of German movement rather than direct attack was the biggest tactical advantage normally gained by allied aircraft in armored warfare.
3. When looking at many accounts of the Western allies in 1944-45 one would swear the Germans won the war. Not only did the Wehrmacht lose, there's a very good chance that it lost more men than the attackers - quite a change from the Ost. Nobody has ever fought a perfect war and in retrospect the tank destroyer did not fill the void that a more robust tank might have. And if the Pershing could not have been deployed in large numbers without screwing up the logistic pipeline, the US certainly should have had 76mm guns on tanks before they did - and maybe grab a few 17lbers too. But German tenacity was due far more to the fact that they were on the defensive than the superiority of their best tanks. The Germans in northern Europe were fighting on excellent defensive terrain - much better than the Ost. It had everything. Hedges, trees, stone walls, streams, rivers, buildings galore and excellent communication were available to what was a very good army. The periods when the Germans attacked their wonder weapons and wonder tactics became very mortal very quickly. Those miserable Shermans when able to get off the first few shots at close range at attacking German armor became dangerous weapons. Lastly, let's not forget that the very large number of Shermans and other AFVs allowed the allies to attach armored battalions (by Sepember 44) to every infantry division which made them, because they were already motorized, the equivalent of Panzergrenadier divisions. This had serious consequences for the Germans. The Germans delivered heavy blows while defending. But because of the Allied decision to emphasize artillery, communications, mobility and simple firepower, an Allied victory in a battle did not simply create German widows - it allowed advances of speed rarely matched in the history of war. When the Germans won a battle we lost tanks. When they lost a battle, they lost armies. That's why in ten months after D-Day, despite bearing all of the disadvantages of the attacker, Allied armies were in Prague, Copenhagen and just west of Berlin. If you were going to get a bit or piece of this process would have been a deeper and more complex picture than the one given by the history channel. Beat Project Runway though.
Eric