Apple TV+ has, in the past, hit big with modernized period television. Dickinson was an underrated masterpiece, starring Hailee Steinfeld in a sexy, fictionalized adaptation of poet Emily Dickinson with a queer spin on her love life. Alongside Bridgerton, Netflix’s steamy Regency-era drama, Dickinson proved that period pieces could be even more exciting with anachronistic twists, like the use of Ariana Grande songs and raunchy cake sex scenes.
With The Buccaneers, an adaptation of Edith Wharton’s final novel, Apple is attempting to double down on this “period but make it contemporary” genre. But Dickinson and Brigerton were able to explore 19th century American and English women with 2020s twists. The Buccaneers, meanwhile, suffers from culture clash—not just in the characters’ debates about English and American ideals, but also from the show’s incongruous attempts at mashing up the late-1800s and today.
The series follows a handful of young American women who have become socialites in London. Nan St. George (Kristine Froseth), who narrates, has never felt like the main character in her own life, The Buccaneers begins, because her rambunctious friends have always stolen the attention from her. Nan doesn’t even feel important in her own home, where her mother (Christina Hendricks) is fixated on Nan’s younger sister Jinny (Imogen Waterhouse), who is far more interested in selling herself away to the right husband in the London Season. But by saying she’s never been the leading lady, Nan immediately makes herself the show’s center of attention.