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The Buccaneers is not your average period drama — at least, it wouldn't have been a few years ago. Hopping on the trend started by shows like Bridgerton, Dickinson and Sanditon and films like 2020's Emma and last year's Persuasion, The Buccaneers is almost aggressively modern. Gone are the period-appropriate costumes, the classical score and the understated performances of the period dramas of the past. In their place, The Buccaneers brings us glossy Gen Z-ified gowns, Taylor Swift needledrops and a juicy teen love triangle.
The TV series stars Christina Hendricks, Imogen Waterhouse and Kate Winslet's daugher Mia Threapleton.
Based on Edith Wharton's unfinished 1870 novel of the same name, The Buccaneers follows five American girls — Nan (Kristine Froseth), Jinny (Imogen Waterhouse), Conchita (Alisha Boe), Mabel (Josie Totah) and Lizzy (Aubri Ibrag) — who travel to England for the debutante season.
Nan, our heroine, is not like the other girls. “I was never supposed to be the main character,” she says in her opening voiceover, adding, “Girls are taught that every story is a love story or a tragedy.” She wants neither.
When she arrives in England with her friends, various love affairs with handsome, rich dukes and lords ensue. Nan (who allegedly doesn't want love?) finds herself in the midst of a love triangle, torn between the cheeky, chipper Guy (Matthew Broome) and a brooding Darcy knock-off in the form of Theo (Guy Remmers).
While the men are drawn to the newcomers, the girls don't exactly fit in. They are too carefree, too loud. The novel traces the clash of the long-established British aristocracy and the gauche nouveaux riche of America in the 1870s. The AppleTV+ version strives to capture this culture clash by transforming its ‘buccaneers’ into Gen Z girls in corsets — girls who, it seems have no qualms about climbing out of windows onto the busy street below, taking off their shoes at a ball or swimming in their underwear. In one early scene, two of the girls even chat with each other while one is on the toilet as if they were two strangers meeting on a drunken night out.
In fact, the entire tone of the show, from the glossy, vibrant design, to the experimental costumes of Giovanni Lepari, to the Gen Z soundtrack, is heightened and stylised.
However, where the show becomes a little grating is in its determination to prove just how feminist it is. Numerous recent period dramas have fallen into the trap of doing away with subtlety and subtext in favour of giving their heroines on-the-nose feminist speeches. Florence Pugh's famous monologue in Little Women springs to mind.
“Now she's going to watch the BBC's Pride and Prejudice for the seventh time, until she falls asleep!”
"As a woman, I have no way to make money, not enough to earn a living and support my family… So don’t sit there and tell me that marriage isn’t an economic proposition, because it is. It may not be for you but it most certainly is for me,” says Pugh in the Greta Gerwig film.
Similarly, Nan delivers her own subtext-less speech about womanhood in the Victoria era. “They are like cattle,” she says of the debutantes at a ball in the first episode. “They are lovely, but they are also human beings who are funny and smart.”
It seems that The Buccaneers falls into the trap of so many recent period dramas — instead of trusting its audience to read into the subtleties and nuances of what the characters don't say, it turns its heroine into a feminist warrior who, at 16, apparently sees the sexism embedded into Victorian society with the clarity of a woman in 2023.
Mad Men's Christina Hendricks as Nan's mother and His Dark Material's Simone Kirby as the governess, Miss Laura Testvalley stand out as some of the few actors in the show who really capture the subtle, underhanded manoeuvring of the the members American society in the 1800s, captured so famously in Waugh's novels.
While The Buccaneers may not be everyone, it will definitely be for lots of people — if you're a fan of the not-so-straight period dramas of the ilk of Bridgerton and Persuasion, The Buccaneers will be right up your alley. It is essentially, The Summer I Turned Pretty with a few old-fashioned words, Victorian-ish clothes and a girl gang who all seems as though they've just finished scrolling TikTok.
The first three episodes of The Buccaneers are streaming on AppleTV+ from 8 November, with further episodes released weekly.
