Black Sails: Starz's big, risky gamble on a pirate TV show

The premium channel's newest original series has promise, but hits some rough waters in its first episodes

Starz

In the second episode of Black Sails — Starz's splashy new pirate series, which premieres tomorrow at 9 p.m. EST — Captain Flint (Toby Stephens) tells a group of his fellow brigands a story. "Odysseus, on his journey home to Ithaca, is visited by a ghost," says Flint. "The ghost tells him that once he reaches his home — once he slays his enemies and sets his house in order — he must do one more thing before he can rest. The ghost says he must take up an oar and walk inland, and keep walking until someone mistakes that oar for a shovel. For that would be a place where no man has ever been troubled by the sea, and that's where he'd find peace."

It's a story that Hollywood itself might do well to remember. For all the cultural icons to go through cycles of popularity with audiences, pirates have always been the biggest gamble. Apart from the weird outlier of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, which was buoyed by the insane level of buzz around Johnny Depp's supporting performance, audiences have largely turned up their noses at pirate movies. Cutthroat Island in 1995 was named the biggest flop of all time in the Guinness Book of World Records, and Disney's Treasure Planet — an animated film that transposed the story of Treasure Island onto a sci-fi adventure — earned a pitiful $38 million domestically on a $140 million budget.

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Scott Meslow

Scott Meslow is the entertainment editor for TheWeek.com. He has written about film and television at publications including The Atlantic, POLITICO Magazine, and Vulture.