When it comes to filling a void in your television schedule, finding a replacement is difficult. For fans of Kurt Sutter’s Sons of Anarchy, the options have been thin. The Bastard Executioner could not catch on with audiences despite a heavy push ahead of its premiere. A spin-off featuring the Mayans motorcycle club is on the way, but what about right now? For a fill of brotherhood, backstabbing, and bloodthirsty violence, there are options. One you should consider checking out is Black Sails. It takes the tone and themes of Sons, but sets them on the high seas during the golden age of piracy. Living beyond the law and creating a world of your own is the driving force behind the outlaws of SAMCRO. And it’s an ideal shared by the various crews of Black Sails’ Nassau.
On the surface, the show doesn’t seem like it would travel alongside Jax Teller. Its main players are based on characters from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, a novel that’s seen adaptations by The Muppets and Walt Disney, among others. It also doesn’t help that the image of pirates today is somewhat tame, with visions of Johnny Depp dancing holding sway. Vicious, brutal criminals have been replaced by the romanticized versions from fiction.
But Black Sails succeeds by ignoring any pirate preconceptions, blending fiction with history and taking piracy back to the sludge from which it crawled. Captain Flint (Toby Stephens), the inciting force behind Stevenson’s book, begins the series on an uneasy throne. Enemies are everywhere and his role as a captain of the Walrus is in question from the start — notably by Billy Bones (Tom Hopper). But he’s still feared by many and respected by more, which counts as currency in the world of the show. Some, on the other hand, have neither, like John Silver (Luke Arnold) who uses his wits to survive from situation to situation, somehow earning the respect of Flint’s crew without seeking it.
Opposing Flint and the characters from Stevenson’s book are a variety of fictionalized historical figures. Charles Vane (Zach McGowan) plays a cruel, calculating pirate flanked by “Calico” Jack Rackham (Toby Schmitz) and Anne Bonny (Clara Paget). There’s also pirate-lord-turned-pirate-hunter Benjamin Hornigold (Patrick Lyster), the legendary Blackbeard, Edward Teach (Ray Stevenson), and more. And where these characters could be paper-thin cameos to give the series some historical legitimacy, they instead live and breathe alongside the primary characters. The series’ world has believability and depth.
Black Sails takes the ideal outlaw life so central to Sons of Anarchy and expands it to the global stage. In Nassau, every truce is uneasy and every decision has a back door. The show keeps the intrigue alive while real history marches on around it. We know Nassau and our real pirates don’t “make it” in the end, but the journey there will be interesting.
Also around: assorted other characters struggling to survive in the show’s universe. Eleanor Guthrie (Hannah New) controls the supplies and represents order, where Max (Jessica Parker Kennedy), a prostitute turned madam, serves as a foil to that order. But don’t think that means there are distinct lines between good and bad in this story. Even the most sympathetic characters have a black heart.
That’s the draw to Black Sails. It taps into the interest in all things pirate created by Jack Sparrow and Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag, but adds violence and grit. It’s a believably dramatized depiction of piracy from the late 17th century that removes both the frills and the romantic imagery, tying piracy back to the brutality of the age.
Black Sails also has a built-in sense of tragedy familiar from Jax Teller and the other members of SAMCRO. James Flint’s journey from the Royal Navy to reluctant pirate captain-in-exile is motivated by passion and emotion. It’s an effort to fulfill the wishes of his former lover Thomas Hamilton (Rupert Penry-Jones) and Hamilton’s wife Miranda Barlow (Louise Barnes). But in the process, Flint is brought towards the very thing he was looking to clean up and loses touch with his past in the process. It might be a reach to make the connection to Jax Teller attempting to save SAMCRO by taking them away from guns, but both characters lose themselves in a process that pushes them toward tragedy.
Other characters have their own interesting arcs, be it Charles Vane’s mysterious past as a child slave to Albinus (Garth Collins) — leading to one of the more vicious showdowns in season one — or the shadowy struggles of Jack Rackham and Anne Bonny to gain control of their own destiny and success on their own ship.
And for a show that requires a hefty amount of special effects to recreate the era, the series looks incredible. Season three has raised the stakes in this department by mounting an impressive set piece wherein Flint points his crew directly into a massive storm in order to escape a trap set by British pirate hunters looking to take back Nassau.
The most important aspect of Black Sails, and one that sets it apart from something like Sons of Anarchy, is that the show doesn’t overstay its welcome. It has a story it is trying to tell and avoids the bloated, overstuffed episodes that plagued the later seasons of Sons. It’s a reminder of that show’s true peak and how it managed to juggle multiple stories at once. Jonathan E. Steinberg and Robert Levine have crafted a series that’s sneakily becoming one of the best shows on Starz, one that easily could have relied solely on its pirate theme and followed the same “blood and boobs” tracks laid by Spartacus. Instead, it finds both depth and excitement while offering a fresh, uncompromising take on a world we only thought we already knew.
