InkBlog

This pirate comedy is executive-produced by Taika Waititi and boasts a superb cast of comic greats. So why do they provide none of the proper laughs?

In Our Flag Means Death (BBC Two), a new HBO ensemble comedy executive-produced by Taika Waititi, Rhys Darby plays an ineffectual 18th-century aristocrat who tries to reinvent himself as a pirate but isn’t cut out for it.

Here’s the thing that makes this series inessential, although it’s hard to dislike: if you’re at all well versed in the TV comedy of the past 15 years, the above summary doesn’t just tell you what the show is about. It gives you a big hint as to the whole style of it, the tone of it, the structure of the jokes. And if it doesn’t, 20 seconds of former Flight of the Conchords star Darby as Stede Bonnet, a nervous fop with benign misapprehensions about his own abilities and the world’s willingness to be impressed by him, will give you the measure of Our Flag Means Death and let you join in with the punchlines. Not that “punchlines” is quite the right word for the comedy payoffs here. There’s no settled name for this type of post-Office ensemble comedy, but you know it as soon as you see it: lots of mumbled irony, diffident delusion and offhand passive aggression. Despite the period setting we are, it seems, drifting in 21st-century alternative comedy’s comfort zone.

It’s 1717 and, as he ineptly helms his magnificent ship the Revenge, Stede pays his crew a steady salary rather than the traditional no-booty, no-dinner model, and encourages his men to talk about how violence makes them feel, lest their mental health suffer. His anachronistic take on piracy – he wants to end the “culture of abuse” in the industry – means he is not exactly knee-deep in stolen doubloons. His crew think they have the worst boss ever, in a politely understated sort of way.

But what a crew! Our Flag Means Death has superb taste in British comedy performers. Having hired an enviable repertory of some of UK telly’s funniest people, however, it proceeds to hand them roles that range from indistinct to virtually invisible, wasting them like a bored billionaire who has bought the best box of chocolates in the Selfridge’s food hall and is now spitting each one out after a single chew. Ewen Bremner is a wild-haired veteran who barely conceals his desire for every crisis to descend into cannibalism, which is a nice idea, but then that’s it. Samson Kayo is a smart, normal man. Joel Fry looks as if he will enhance the action as a pessimistic lute-twanging bard (“To death we go/To certain death we go/Our one hope being that our certain death ain’t slow”), but then the show forgets to make him keep doing that and he fades into the background. Guz Khan is … just a pirate.

The US players aren’t used much more efficiently: among the familiar faces who are either a mark of a quality production or a sign of a certain relaxed chumminess in the casting, depending how charitable you’re feeling, are Fred Armisen, Leslie Jones and Kristen Schaal, all given silly little guest roles they handle with ease.

None of this is necessarily a dealbreaker. Rhys Darby might be playing an intensely Rhys Darby-ish role to the point that you know what he is going to say and do before he says and does it, but nobody does that chirpy kook thing like him. And one reason why Our Flag Means Death’s producers have been so profligate with the big-name talent is that they have realised the least famous of their British contingent is their sharpest weapon: Nathan Foad, previously known for Twitter videos and his own decent but obscure comedy Newark, Newark (on Gold), delivers a star-making turn as Lucius, the ship’s eye-rolling scribe, whose mix of panic, disgust, frantic gossip and tart contempt provides nearly all of the proper laughs.

If you get through the first couple of episodes on iPlayer, slowly, Our Flag Means Death finds its feet as a moseying gang show with a tender heart. The joke that these 18th-century people all talk as if they are in 2023 seems glib at the outset but, once the series reveals itself to be gently but firmly diverse and inclusive, that dissonance acquires a serious purpose as a love letter to those long dead who couldn’t be themselves in their own times. The way one character is casually referred to as “they” by the others is unexpectedly, disarmingly touching. And, when Waititi himself finally appears as the universally feared Blackbeard, who in this show is a mercurial dreamer undergoing an identity crisis, there is the germ of a love story that might just be what the early episodes’ jokes never are: a surprise. Our Flag Means Death might be too laid-back to actually be funny, but it drifts towards somewhere good.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaKymYq6vsIyrmJ2hn2R%2FcX6SaKGapl9lgXC71Ktkn6SRnHquscCnqmaclZbBqXnRnq2inadirm7Azq2YpWWnlsC1sYyonWaln6jBbrvFZquhnV2XsrTAjJympp2Unq6vv4yipWasmJp6uLvRpZs%3D