HBO Max’s ‘Our Flag Means Death’: TV Review

Faced with the prospect of a proper bloody battle in the first episode of HBO Max’s Our Flag Means Death, pirate captain Stede Bonnet (Rhys Darby) has a horrifying realization. “Oh God. I’ve made a mistake,” he cries. “I’m not a pirate. I’m an idiot.” He’s not wrong: An aristocrat who ditched his pampered life more or less on a whim, Stede has no business trying to plunder the high seas. But his misguided life choices make for endearing comedy and, eventually, for a surprising amount of heart.

Created by David Jenkins (People of Earth) and loosely based on the real Stede Bonnet, Our Flag Means Death arrives with echoes of several other series: It’s a workplace comedy about a bumbling boss not entirely unlike The Office, but also a cheeky genre subversion like What We Do in the Shadows (with whom it shares an actor, pilot director and executive producer in Taika Waititi), with an earnest sunniness that could’ve been borrowed from Ted Lasso. But if Our Flag Means Death has a single defining quality, it’s “cute” — and, yes, that’s a compliment.

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The core premise, of a series set during the Golden Age of Piracy but centering on a notoriously clueless pirate instead of a famously dashing one, is cute. The jokes that come from it are also cute, more geared toward chuckles than belly laughs. Some of them rely on the random silliness of, say, crew member Buttons (Ewan Bremner) basking naked in the moonlight while communing with his favorite seagull friend. Others mine the stark juxtaposition between the show’s violent period setting and Stede’s softer, often more modern sensibilities. In a world where a feared pirate like Spanish Jackie (Leslie Jones) might keep a “nose jar” to store the noses she’s removed from her enemies, Stede pays his crew a regular wage, encourages them to talk out their feelings and reads them bedtime stories.

As the season progresses, Stede and his crew’s misadventures gradually evolve into more emotional (but still quite amusing) storylines that could be described, too, as cute — but also tender and oddly touching. The more serious bent doesn’t come entirely as a shock; as early as the pilot, flashbacks to Stede’s miserable marriage and still more miserable childhood indicate that Our Flag Means Death means to humanize Stede and sympathize with him, not just laugh at him and the alien mores of the era he lived in. But it’s the arrival of the legendary pirate Blackbeard (Waititi) around episode four that steers Our Flag Means Death toward deeper, more mysterious waters.

Intrigued by reports of this strange “Gentleman Pirate,” Blackbeard seeks out Stede and the crew of his Revenge — and once arrived, sees in Stede an opportunity to shake himself out of his ennui. Blackbeard’s entrance reorients the very gravity of the series: He’s no mere recurring guest but a full-blown co-lead, and the twisty relationship he forms with Stede becomes the narrative spine of the entire series. Waititi and Darby, who’ve been working together since Flight of the Conchords, make for a wonderfully odd couple, Waititi’s kooky charisma playing off of Darby’s prim nervousness. The funniest installment of the season turns their dynamic on its head, sending Blackbeard into the treacherous uncharted territory of a French high-society party with Stede as his guide.

Meanwhile, the series’ sadder moments lie in the backstories for both men, and the ways their unhappy pasts have informed the people they’ve become today. But Our Flag Means Death handles the darker aspects of its story with a light touch. The show rarely dwells too long on Stede’s guilt about abandoning his family or Blackbeard’s painful memories of childhood before moving on to some other bit of wackiness. For that matter, although Stede mentions the “mental devastation” of witnessing violence in his very first lines of dialogue, and although he and several other characters will sustain serious injuries before the end of the season, the actual violence depicted in the series is never graphic enough to be upsetting.

Such restraint keeps Our Flag Means Death from saying anything truly novel or profound about trauma or class or masculinity or any of the other larger ideas it invokes. However, it also keeps the show’s tone on an even keel as an ensemble comedy. There’s room for goofier characters like Nat Faxon’s to wander around describing his scurvy symptoms in the same episode that more grounded characters like the deadly Jim (Vico Ortiz) and the gentle Oluwande (Samson Kayo) reach a pivotal moment in their longstanding relationship, and guest stars like Nick Kroll and Kristen Schaal are given plenty of leeway to ham it up.

Our Flag Means Death won’t be the deepest show you’ve seen about a midlife crisis, or the most dramatic — but should you find yourself in the mood to relax on mostly warm, mostly gentle waters with an adorable group of weirdos, it’ll hit the spot.