After Jack Sparrow to Captains Phillips and Hook, pirates seem among us again, eough to warrant a limited series about the adventure.
“The Black Sails” (Starz, 9 p.m.) is an eight-episode Michael Bay production that includes Toby Stephens as Captain Flint and Luke Arnold as John Silver. Long before tonight’s first season premiere, however, a second season was already ordered and under way.
Because they couldn’t base that on ratings, they based it on their own reaction and that of fans at Comic Con, says Starz CEO Chris Albrecht.
“We premiered the show at Comic Con for the fans. The response was phenomenal,” he said. “Some critics there declared pirates the new zombies. We thought that was some pretty good footsteps to follow in.
“The other thing is we love the show,” he added. And the economics of the production suggests they go forward if they feel good about it rather than waiting for the premiere.
“We’re willing to stand behind a show that we believe in,” Albrecht told reporters at the TV Critics Association winter press tour earlier this month. “At some point the show needs to make a good business case for itself, but we’re very excited about what we saw with the first season of ‘Black Sails’ and have already shot, I think, two episodes of the second season.”
Although it’s set in the 18th century Caribbean, it’s shot in South Africa — miles away from the coast.
“When you talk to all the people who have done shows set on the water, including ‘Waterworld,’ ‘Master and Commander,’ things like that, they all tell you, ‘Don’t shoot on the water,’” said Carmi Zlotnik managing director of Starz. “So what we ended up doing was building an enormous facility that includes a tank, a beach, two ships, an entire town down in Cape Town.”
“Black Sails” is meant to be the prequel to “Treasure Island,” with a number of historical figures taking part, including Jack Rackham, Charles Vane and Anne Bonny, though two of the stars are from “Treasure Island,” John Flint, played by Toby Stevens, and Long John Silver, portrayed by Luke Arnold.
Zlotnik says the idea behind the series is “capturing a moment in time when people who had been authorized by the British Crown to act as privateers and loot on the open ocean on behalf of the British Crown all of a sudden became criminals.”
Amid this dramatic shift, Captain Flint “has some serious motives that are some of which are overt in terms of building a civilization, some of which are very, very personal, dark, and disturbing, you know, that really touch off the story.”