On the surface, this show seems tailor-made for someone like me. It is an Apple TV+ production (so, high budget) of an unfinished Edith Wharton novel (so, full of incredibly difficult women and also open-ended) about five American women storming late 19th-century London high society (so Lisa Kleypas’ The Wallflowers). Furthermore, this is a deliberately anachronistic saucy adaptation a la Bridgerton and Marie Antoinette; Taylor Swift is playing in the background, and there are sequins everywhere. It’s The Gilded Age, but all the costume designers are on acid. It’s Reign, but make it Mark Twain. I think this is difficult to pull off, but when it works, it works.
So why am I over here with a whole plate of bones to pick, you may ask? Well, in this case, it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work… badly. The Buccaneers is a loose adaptation of Edith Wharton’s last and unfinished novel about five American girls (Nan, Jinny, Mabel, Conchita, and Lizzy) who take London society by storm. It follows their loves and losses and operates as a social critique of the limitations placed on women, the unchecked damage that can come from great wealth and privilege, and the social friction between American mores and British ones.
I’ve spoken at length about Bridgerton, which I think is one of the best examples of a successful mixed-era adaptation. Bridgerton is a fantasia of the early 19th century. Its most meaningful fantasy (although also its least developed) is (broadly) a world where the British and U.S. slave trade seemingly never existed. Although there are class tensions that sometimes attach themselves to race, racism is more associated with those class tensions than with any historical subjugation or race-based system of inferiority. Layered on top of that (although narratively unrelated), plastic sequins exist! The Vitamin String Quartet has transcribed the back catalogs of every 21st-century female pop star for use at various balls. No one ever wears a real hat, and true love is the goal of marriage. Somehow, this mostly works.
So why doesn’t it work in The Buccaneers, a show that, on its face, seems like it’s using the exact Bridgerton playbook? There are a couple of background reasons I think the show stumbles, briefly: adapting an Edith Wharton novel and adapting a steamy bodice ripper are two very different things. Wharton novels are bleak and mean (compliment); Julia Quinn novels are soapy and steamy (compliment). The series also markedly departs from some of the key plot points of the novel in tonally inconsistent ways, so it is trying to sort of steer a ship made half of solid wood (biting social satire) and half of pink jello (romantic soap opera). But the real reason this show sticks in my craw is simple: manners.
I am simply too well-read, both in novels of this period and novels set in this period, to countenance a Duchess asking an earl’s son to pass the potatoes. I just can’t do it (where are your footmen??). Nor can I handle the young women of this novel regularly wearing their corsets (in public) as tops. I cannot handle how frequently both men and women take their clothes off and plunge into a body of water, in mixed company (still wearing those corsets, mind you, which would ruin both the corsets and the women). I can overlook the fact that the costumes are sort of 30% 1870s/70% 1950s. I cannot overlook the fact that these women exclusively dress and act like period-accurate courtesans, but face no social censure of any kind. Why are there no servants anywhere unless it’s narratively convenient (someone has to take Guy’s telegram… from his desk in his bedroom while he’s sleeping?) Why don’t any of these girls know how to eat soup? This may not bother some viewers; if you are not as well-read in this genre or this period as I am, it may all just seem like a fun Disney-fied version of the past. But to me, the historical inaccuracies weigh the show down because they’re so distracting and nonsensical. In Bridgerton, characters may wear clothes no 19th-century modiste could have constructed, but the manners governing the period are still very much in play because they are necessary to understand the conflicts the characters encounter. Without that, why not just set The Buccaneers in 1955? The eveningwear would hardly have to change at all, and it would at least be plausible that an aristocrat would handle their own potatoes.
It is made clear at the beginning of the series that Nan and Jinny’s mother (played by an ever-perfect Christina Hendricks) is a social climber. They have money but no social standing, either in New York’s old-money society or in London's really old-money society. They go to England to try and marry some class so the Van Rensselaers and the Astors will grace their ballrooms. The British aristocracy gets a needed infusion of cash; so far, so historically consistent. The daughters of families like this would have been raised from birth to have flawless manners. This is why they have a British governess. What has she been doing!? Instead, the internal logic of the show is that they are American (read, feminist, modern, sexually liberated, fun, loud) and are above trying to “fit in” to the British aristocracy (except when the show wants them to fit in, like when Jinny goes to Queen Charlotte’s ball). The show consistently rewards (at the very least fails to punish) the five women for displaying the worst manners you could possibly imagine. They scream and run around, they are frequently in public without their clothes on (Conchi dry humps her husband on a sofa in front of a room full of people and no one even seems to notice), they completely disregard any rules around chaperonage for young women; Conchi throws a house party early on and invites her husband and his friends to ogle her half naked drunk teenage friends. When one of those friends takes advantage of one of those friends for some non-consensual naked humiliation, it only confirms what we the viewers know about this era: the protections for young noble women may seem incredibly restrictive to modern eyes but they were meant to keep those women safe in an era when men could get away with pretty much anything. But since no one else in the show knows this happened, there’s not even a chance for Conchi or anyone else to reflect that maybe they shouldn’t have thrown a light bacchanal. All the bad manners are messaged as “American,” as if all Americans are just thoughtless assholes (compliment) all the time. They’re so much more real and free when they’re running around in the rain and nearly falling off cliffs and twerking or something. It’s just… a lazy way to shorthand the cultural differences that Wharton actually took the time to accurately portray in her novel.
For some reason, the only social norm this show cares about is that of legitimacy. In a departure from the book, Nan finds out early in the series that she is illegitimate. She tells her first love interest this, and he rejects her, then she doesn’t tell her second love interest (a Duke). She then is a complete bitch to everyone, especially her mother (who raised her like she was her own and had to endure a marriage of infidelity, but whatever) and declares she has to tell the Duke the truth or he will never really know her. Why does the show suddenly care about this? It doesn’t care at all about any other aristocratic norm; why isn’t Nan throwing her arms wide and twirling near a cliff while she declares that her legitimacy doesn’t define her, and her American spirit is stronger than such silly conventions, winning over those stuffy aristos and earning the love of every man within a country mile? Who knows!? Consistency is too much to ask for here.
Even beyond its representation of the manners of this era, the show is incredibly sloppy. There are endless examples, but just to name a few: Nan is meant to be 16 in the book, which is why she isn’t coming “out” into society at the same time as her sister Jinny — she’s too young to debut. But once they’re in England and Nan has returned from a random trip to Cornwall, she is treated as just as eligible as the other girls, if a bit more strange and quiet. Guy, her first love interest, almost proposes to her, and the Duke, her second, does, and neither seems to have the slightest hesitation in doing so, suggesting that she is not, in fact, 16. Proposing to a 16-year-old who hasn’t even debuted into society yet (this usually happened at 17 or 18) would be fairly scandalous. Not unheard of, but very unusual and more likely to happen as the result of a long-standing arranged marriage than a chance encounter. For a 16-year-old to even spend time with eligible men would be considered inappropriate; until you debut, you would basically be seen as a child in the eyes of society. The show asserts in its promotional materials that she’s 17, but that’s almost worse — if she’s 17, she should have debuted at the same time as Jinny, and to not do so would be seen as evidence her parents were too poor to put two girls through the London Season.
There’s a lot more. Timelines make no sense; the Duke proposes to Nan near the beginning of the Season (Conchi has just had her baby), but then she doesn’t seem to see him again or meet his family or anything important until the end of the Season, which would be August 12. What has everyone been doing for 2 months? The house party Conchi throws takes place right after she gives birth (which takes place within a month of Queen Charlotte’s Ball (mid-May), so sometime in early June. Then we time skip to Nan going to Tintagel for the first time and acting like she hasn’t exchanged a word with her fiancé since the proposal. Why didn’t we get to see the girls engage in the season? They have one ball, then two of them get engaged at a random and completely inappropriate house party (both seemingly without any courtship whatsoever), then boom, it’s two months later and Jinny has eloped (something no one in this period would do unless they were covering up a scandal; this would quite literally cause her to be shunned by society, not invited to a Duke’s castle) and the other girls have given up on finding husbands (except Nan, who has somehow frozen her courtship in amber). Why can’t we see them navigate the season? The whole point of this book is that these American girls are coming in to shake up British high society; why don’t we get to see them interact with anyone beyond two families? Why are their parents ok with any of this? Why has Nan’s mother just… left and gone back to America right when her daughter has gotten engaged to a Duke?
The second season of this show premieres in a few weeks (June 18) and I just want this show to be better (they literally added Blair Waldorf and I want to watch it but also don’t!). This is bad television (not a compliment) and viewers deserve better.