Despite the excellent writing on display, little of the success of Our Flag Means Death, HBO Max’s revisionist take on 18th-century piracy, would be possible were it not for the hugely likable performance of Rhys Darby in the leading role. A celebrated comedian best known in America for HBO’s Emmy-nominated Flight of the Conchords, Darby is at once a bumbler, straight man, pratfaller, and wise fool — the guiding light by which the entire program maneuvers. Importantly, and perhaps surprisingly given the size of his role, the actor plays Captain Stede Bonnet with understated humility rather than panache, content to leave the showiest bits to his castmates and to retreat, when necessary, behind his serene and winning grin. Bonnet is not, as Our Flag Means Death makes indisputably clear, a pirate for the ages. He just might be, however, the comic hero of the year.
The series is as breezy as the open sea and as savory as mutton pie. A 10-episode lark split into half-hour segments, it practically demands to be watched in a single sitting.
The series opens in 1717 aboard the good ship Revenge, where Bonnet is exhorting his men to new heights of achievement. For Bonnet, a quixotic gentleman who sees in the skull and crossbones an opportunity for self-actualization, success is a matter of mutual civility as much as plunder and pillage. (“Polite menace,” our hero tells an associate. “That’ll be my brand.”) Though baffled by their leader’s utter lack of rapacity, Bonnet’s shipmates have long ago made their peace with his beneficent style. “If someone returns from the raid mentally devastated,” the captain intones, “we talk it through as a …” “Crew,” his sailors respond in unison.
Warding off post-traumatic stress disorder is only one part of what motivates Bonnet, whose inclination throughout is toward a kinder, gentler form of buccaneering. Concerned that his men feel obligated to maraud for their supper, Bonnet puts his crew on salary and sets them to designing the Revenge’s new flag. Having run aground on a tropical island, he patiently talks his shipmates through the concept of relaxation with which they, as members of their time, place, and class, have absolutely no familiarity. Like Year of the Rabbit, IFC’s criminally underwatched comedy of Victorian crime-fighting, Our Flag Means Death pumps new life into an old genre by ignoring its conventions altogether. Because Bonnet is in over his head, a better guidance counselor than swashbuckling skipper, he simply lacks the capacity to enact the Jolly Roger cliches in which the Pirates of the Caribbean films swam and ultimately sank.
Created by David Jenkins, the comedy writer responsible for TBS’s short-lived People of Earth, HBO’s new series is at its best when presenting the kind of sight gags to which Bonnet’s unusual methods give rise. Strolling alongside the ship’s resident scrivener, for example, the captain can’t help drawing attention to the vessel’s numerous “amenities,” a boast that occasions hilarious shots of shipboard tennis and cannonball polishing. Another bit, meant to illustrate Bonnet’s moral fussiness, sees the captain watching in horror as the crewmen whack watermelons to pieces in preparation for a brawl. Presented at blink-and-you’ll-miss-it speed, such visual surprises create a sense of propulsion that more than makes up for the series’s almost total lack of dramatic stakes. Indeed, the show’s occasional gestures in the direction of melancholy (as when Bonnet’s unhappy childhood is plumbed) are comparatively lackluster. A work of comedy surrealism in the Monty Python vein, Jenkins’s program neither requires nor has use for the stuff of gloomy, quotidian experience.
Joining Bonnet aboard the Revenge is a gang of hands who look as though they were recruited directly from the Island of Misfit Toys. Wee John Feeney (Kristian Nairn) may be a mountain of a man, but his pyromania threatens every vessel he boards. Mute fighter Jim Jimenez (Vico Ortiz) is a genius with a blade but bears a particularly fateful secret. (Jim’s “reveal,” which involves a fake beard and a surprisingly ladylike voice, is perfectly timed and executed.) If Mr. Buttons (Ewen Bremner), the ship’s grizzled first mate, wishes to advance in the world, he should probably refrain from gnawing his colleagues’ fingers, a propensity exposed in an amusing episode-six sequence. Similarly handicapped is Pete (Matthew Maher), whose claims to have worked with Blackbeard might be more convincing were it not for his ridiculous, show-stopping lisp.
Though it would not be an abuse of the term to call the misadventures of Bonnet and company a plot, perhaps a better assessment is that Jenkins has strung together a series of antic vignettes, each as absurd as the last. In one, the Revenge must deal with a British warship captained by Bonnet’s longtime frenemy, Nigel Badminton (Rory Kinnear). In another, the gang visits the Republic of Pirates, a “hellish cesspool” run by the bellicose Spanish Jackie (Saturday Night Live’s Leslie Jones, essentially playing herself). In the show’s most intricate narrative, Bonnet makes friends with the legendary Blackbeard (Taika Waititi, excellent) but finds in his new chum a man on the brink of an existential crisis. True to form, Our Flag Means Death plays Blackbeard’s mental health predicament for laughs, embarking on a Trading Places-like jaunt that sees the two men instructing one another in rapine and table manners, their respective areas of expertise.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
