piracy

Taika Waititi Is Developing a Comedy Series About a Fancy Pirate

Don’t pirate his new show. Photo: Kris Lori/imageSPACE/Shutterstock

If there’s a bloodthirsty air to it, you best believe Taika Waititi has made a comedy about it: Vampires, Norse Gods of Death, Hitler, and now, the next logical step, pirates. On September 15, HBO Max announced that it has ordered a new comedy series from director and executive producer Taika Waititi, called Our Flag Means Death. According to a statement, the show is “loosely based on the true adventures of Stede Bonnet, a pampered aristocrat who abandoned his life of privilege to become a pirate.” Some light research reveals that Bonnet was known as “the Gentleman Pirate,” for he was a very fancy landowning lad born to an English family in Barbados who nonetheless took to the seven seas, flew a flag with a little skull on it, and may or may not have actually made people walk the plank (historians debate whether or not he was an early adopter of that particular pirate trend). It’s the sort of costume-y fish-out-of-water story that seems automatically appealing to Waititi, but why do I think Waititi just chose to produce this series because there’s something hilarious about the first name “Stede?” Series creator David Jenkins will serve as show runner/cap’n.

Taika Waititi Developing Comedy Series About a Fancy Pirate