(Thread)
Opens mouth, 20000 words on the scope and tone of Black Sails season one, and how a lot of the things that get it labelled as The Worst Season read as deliberate decisions to me pour out.

SPOILERS FOR S1, but references to the other seasons as well.

S1 is probably the most controversial season in the Black Sails fandom for a lot of reasons (a prominent sexual assault storyline, The Bluebeard Scene, Eleanor's introduction; I would LOVE to read an essay or ten on breaking down Vane as [...]

[...] the formerly enslaved POV character in the main cast for S1, which feels to me like it warrants more examination than I've seen it given; and so on and so forth.)

A lot of the sex and violence and sexy-violence aesthetic of S1's tone and subject matter gets laid on the doorstep of The State of Prestige Cable TV circa 2014 and Starz/Executive Producer Michael Bay/etc

Game of Thrones was going into its fourth season. Mad Men was coming to an end. Starz had just wrapped Spartacus, a show which - fairly or otherwise - had largely been defined by its relationship to sex and violence.

The common read I've seen seems to be that a lot of the more prototypical 'GoT-y' elements of Black Sails S1 which either faded or were entirely stripped from the show by the time we get to S2 [...]

[...] are things the network pushed for specifically with an eye toward those aforementioned programming trends and branding.

Without getting too deep into How The Sausage Gets Made conversations about how TV works or picking over single story beats elements too closely (as mentioned earlier those are essays in and over themselves),

What If Instead: Yes, these decisions can have been made with eye toward marketing and viewership. They can also be representative of one of the primary themes of Black Sails, which is that narrative fact is a crossroads between conflicting expectations and perspectives.

Black Sails is about expecting one kind of story and getting something else. The very first sequence of the show presents pirates as monsters enacting violence against a merchant ship, only to complicate that read in the immediate aftermath.

S1 as a whole is essentially that bait and switch sequence played out for an entire season, relying on a series of assumptions that we as a Game of Thrones-primed audience were willing to lay at the feet of How TV Works In 2014.

(I'd also argue the tide of the narrative's scope and tone doesn't wait until S2 to turn, but begins in Episode V; this is the episode where the assault plot line is laid to rest, alliances on the island begin to shift, [...]

[...] Flint is forced to ally with an enslaved force in order to reach his goals—which parallels later story beats—, Miranda's pardon request is discovered, and Billy's fall and assumed death quite LITERALLY calls into question the story (Treasure Island) we think we know.)

Are the choices S1 makes too subtle? Yeah, maybe. In the words of a pal: "I think it's easy to miss the complexity on a first pass and whether that's a bug or a feature is up for debate." Intentional? No idea!

Maybe it's just one of these stars aligning coincidences of figuring out how to tell a focused story within the boundaries of an imposed limitation.

But that sense of taking tone and story elements which are common to the programming landscape (Tough Girl introduces herself as a Tough Girl and you can tell because She Swears About It!) [...]

[...] and having those be motivated by subtle or unseen character reasons only for them to become textual as the audience's understanding grows (Tough Girl intros herself by Swearing About It as an appeal to the masculine culture she's struggling to gain respect in, [...]

[...] and ultimately Tough Acting Girl is doomed by her attempts to do what A Society wants and how unjust that is) feel more complicated than just Starz Made Them Do It.

WHICH IS VERY NEAT. And to me establishing that as the foundation is a part of what makes later "turns" in the tone and style of the show feel so effective.

Ok back to sweating about Georgia now

(But for real if anyone has broken down Vane's relationship to dealing with the trauma of being formly enslaved in S1 vs how currently enslaved characters in the same season Don't Really Get That In The Same Way, I want to read those essays

because I think there are arguments for and against how it's handled, and they're all worth sitting with.)