Weekend Watch - Our Flag Means Death
Our Flag Means Death does a really good job of making a show about pirates into something wholesome about friendship, relationships, gender, sexuality, and also lots of pirates.
Welcome back to the Weekend Watch where each week I talk about a new-ish piece of media and give you a brief, mostly spoiler-free review and tell you whether or not to watch it. This week, we’re back in the world of streaming television with a show that I’m kinda late to, and I’m sure you’ve heard about but may not have watched. It’s Our Flag Means Death on HBO Max. I started this show weeks ago when it first got big, but only watched the first episode and was relatively entertained. This week, a friend from high school recommended the show to me, so I decided to pick it back up, and let me just say, it did not disappoint.
Letter Grade: A – high quality pirate comedy
Should you Watch This Show? Yeah! Definitely.
Why?
Our Flag Means Death fits into quite a few genres very well but also plays outside the lines of most of those genres. Perhaps most fitting genre is comedy, which it delivers on consistently in each episode, often following the Taika Waititi brand of comedy in a similar fashion as What We Do in the Shadows, crafting satire, witticisms, and legitimately quality humor into a show about pirates. At the same time, this show is not comedy just for the sake of comedy – it deals heavily with modern issues (not just modern for the 1700s either) and focuses concepts like masculinity and femininity and everything that goes into that conversation with the tact and familiarity that such concepts should be discussed. As an action show, it delivers on occasion, often seeking to poke fun at the ways we expect action sequences to go and very much emphasizing the show’s protagonist’s (Stede Bonnet played by Rhys Darby) physical aversion to violence. As a pirate show, it has those in spades. Many historical figures from the “golden age of piracy” are featured in this show in both cameos and major roles. Stede Bonnet the “Gentleman Pirate”, Edward “Blackbeard” Teach, and Izzy Hands all feature heavily in the show, no doubt pleasing those looking for historicity. Also, though, the pirate stuff is just plain fun. The show plays on audience expectations of how pirates are supposed to be and turns a lot of that on its head in consistently creative and interesting ways. Our Flag Means Death does a really good job of making a show about pirates into something wholesome about friendship, relationships, gender, sexuality, and also lots of pirates.