Originally published at: First peek at Taika Waititi's pirate comedy, "Our Flag Means Death" | Boing Boing
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Things I like:
Taika Waititi 
Rhys Darby
18th century maritime history
I, for one, am excited
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Definitely appears to be a spectacularly fun show. I’m looking forward to it.
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The corporate/HR pep talk from the captain to the crew sold me on it.
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Just read the Cliff’s Notes version of Bonnet’s bio on Wikipedia and I can already see why it would be a story ripe for comedy. What a sad sack of a pirate captain that doofus turned out to be.
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loves me some piratin’
wiil watch!
oh, and as mentioned already: Taika frikkin Waititi!
sold!
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Looks promising. I wonder how many other famous pirate cameos there will be other than Blackbeard? For years now I’ve been amazed that nobody has done a big-budget movie or TV show featuring Anne Bonny & Mary Read, two badass women pirates whose stories are just begging to be shown on film. They were active at the same time as Bonnet so maybe they’ll cross paths in this show.
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Oooooh I am SO looking forward to this!
As an aside, I’ve read it was generally far better conditions-wise to be a pirate (assuming one did not get caught) than to man merchant naval vessels.
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that’d be Capt. Teach you refer and take care the utt’rin’ his name.
as for the women, too many conflicting reports, tales and legend surround them. some say Bonney escaped the noose and was privated away back to Ireland. reports of the day say she gave birth* and was then hanged. Mary Read(e) most likely was summarily hanged at Port Royal circa 1720(?) dates vary. the two would certainly be good for a more fanciful “based on real peopl” type fictional history, but the same is true for most of the feared names of pirate lore.
ETA *most like birthed Jack Rackam’s baby.
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From a storytelling perspective that’s a plus, not a minus.
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Based on skimming the Wikipedia entry, I think that it will be more than a cameo.
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i thought… the best thing… about being a pirate???
Was?
of course…
HAM NIGHT!!
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You had me at “Taika Waititi’s pirate comedy”.
I hope their introduction to Blackbeard is better than the one in the Starz series Black Sails.
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They did a TV series mixing real and fictional pirates which was pretty good
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I rather liked that series. a mish-mosh of pirate legend, lumping together some pirates that were not even contemporaries of the time.
coulda shown Cpt. Teach a tad more respect.
check out the NBC series Crossbones where John Malkovich portray Cpt Teach as if he had escaped and grew old on a “pirate island”. real fantasy, but worth it for Malkovich alone!
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@garethb2 you missed Fred Armisen at 1:02! Our Flag Means Death | Official Teaser | HBO Max - YouTube Or I suppose you just might not think he’s interesting talent 
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I liked it too.
Crossbones was just plain bonkers (in a good way). It never stood a chance on NBC. It came out the same year as a truly weird Dracula show on the same network.
Kinda makes me think the showrunners had some kind of blackmail material on the network executives in order to get them greenlit.
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Most of it is folklore rather than reality, as it is for most of the pirates of that era. A friend read the actual records of Bonney and Read’s trial as part of her degree in feminist history, and they were petty thieves who ended up in front of an unforgiving judge on the same day as several pirates were on trial. A General History of the Pyrates is a notoriously unreliable historical source, and without it there is no earlier evidence that they were pirates.
There are several women who really were pirates who have interesting stories of their own, but they weren’t in the Carribean during that time period so they aren’t relevant to this show.
And like I said, Bonney and Read are part of the folklore, so there is no reason why they shouldn’t be in this show. Just don’t go mistaking them for what is reality.
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