Television series

Our Flag Means Death

Name: Our Flag Means Death
Genre: Comedy, Adventure
Released: 2022
Cast: Rhys Darby, Samson Kayo, Joel Fry, Matthew Maher, Nathan Foad

A gentle, gorgeous mess of a pirate comedy: a bored aristocrat buys himself a ship and a crew and stumbles, gloriously unprepared, into infamy. It's slapstick and swordfights on the surface, but underneath it's a tender, patient love story and a comedy about men learning to be soft with each other. Funnier than it has any right to be, and sneakily devastating.

TVMaze rating

6.7

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Another show about an unlikely, emotionally open man leading a crew of misfits who slowly become a family, with the same trick of sneaking real feeling in through the jokes.

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The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

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This is the direct ancestor: a comic pirate adventure that plays swashbuckling for laughs rather than menace, proving the mash-up isn't a new idea, just a newly tender one.

Burt Lancaster grinning through acrobatic swashbuckling in a film that treats piracy as pure slapstick spectacle — swordfights as vaudeville, decades before OFMD made the same joke.

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For when you want the quietest possible version of this show's tenderness: two gentle men, a hobby, and comedy so soft it barely announces itself.

But Almost nothing happens, on purpose. If you came for adventure this will feel motionless.

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Same engine — a useless, sweet-natured captain and his devoted misfit crew — reduced to its purest, most family-friendly form, showing how flexible the premise really is.

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