Our Flag Means Death was so much more than a ‘gay pirate show’-Marc Burrows-Entertainment – Metro

Nothing prepared me for how much I’d enjoy the show (Picture: BBC/Warner Bros Entertainment)

That’s how I first heard Our Flag Means Death described.

The cultishly popular, critically acclaimed HBO comedy was cancelled this week after just two seasons.

I’m not sure if ‘a gay pirate show’ was the pitch creator David Jenkins used when he went in for his meeting with HBO, but that’s how it was being sold, mid-pandemic, by terminally online Gen Zs. 

Obviously that’s catnip for someone like me, a queer comedy fan with too much time on his hands. 

Especially when you hear that Rhys Darby, the brilliant Kiwi comic who steals every scene he’s in, was starring alongside Taika Waititi, the bigshot Hollywood director – best known these days for Marvel smash-hits, but with a background in low-key improv comedy.

None of that prepared me for how much I’d love the show, though. It gets off to a slow start, but by episode five of the first season you’re ready to die for any of the characters and by the season finale you’re left a blubbering mess. 

Season 2 hasn’t even aired in the UK yet. I’d been looking forward to it, but it will feel bittersweet now.

It was revealed this week that she show’s second voyage will be its last — true to its trigger happy reputation, HBO is dumping the crew of the Revenge overboard.

It’s gutting, not just because the show is such a delight, but also because it does something for queer representation that few shows have done over the years.

OFMD starts off as an extremely silly workplace comedy about inept pirates captained by a likeable buffoon, but it quickly becomes one of the sweetest romantic comedies of the last decade; a show littered with beautifully poignant moments.

When one of the central characters tucks a handkerchief into the other’s pocket, telling them ‘you wear fine things well’ – my god, that killed me.

Stolen glances. Sheer sweetness. We watch two people fall gently but hopelessly in love, and then watch them shatter each other’s hearts.

And they’re men. Did I mention that? They don’t call it a gay pirate show for nothing.  

The lovers in question are real historical pirates Stede Bonnet (Darby), silly, floppy of hair, trusting and brave, and Blackbeard (Waititi), swashbuckling, ruthless, by turns menacing and naïve – not to mention ridiculously sexy. 

The show is wildly absurdist, happily playing fast, loose and stupid with history, geography and even the laws of physics, but that central romance? My god, it works.

And for someone like me that’s remarkable. Historically we’ve hardly ever had breezy, light comedies with queer romances at their centre. Back in the 90s, when I was discovering who I was, there was almost nothing on TV that helped form healthy ideas of queer sexuality. 

To be gay or bisexual on television meant either furtive, gritty dramas full of seediness, secrecy and misery, or being the butt of the jokes in a sitcom — you were either dying of AIDS or treated as a laughing stock.

Take the episode of Friends where Joey and Chandler take Ross’s baby out for a walk and are mistaken for a gay couple –  oh the horror! 

Knowing the show co-starred Taika Waititi (right) was a huge part of the appeal (Picture: Warner Bros Entertainment)

It’s one of countless examples from my youth where queerness is treated as the ultimate punchline. 

This was a decade where television comedy was so straight that even a show with the promisingly progressive title My Two Dads turned out to be about a teenage girl who didn’t know which of two straight men was her biological father. 

I still can’t believe a programme with that name –  and basically the same plot as Mamma Mia – was so relentlessly, joylessly free of camp.

I now understand that as a queer teenager, I desperately needed something in which I could see myself that didn’t freak me out in some way.

Something cosy and normal. Instead, we had edgy dramedies like This Life and Queer as Folk and gay kisses that caused huge rows on Brookside, EastEnders and even Byker Grove. 

All of these were important, but they weren’t stories about people in love, they were stories about people being gay. 

And of course that was necessary. Of course those stories needed to be told. But we had nothing gentle. Nothing silly. Nothing that said ‘two people of the same gender can have a ridiculous romantic comedy and the fact they’re men is never the point or the problem’.

TV shows like Good Omens are showing how love can flourish on TV regardless of gender (Picture: Prime Video)

This was compounded because I grew up during Section 28, an era when we weren’t allowed to be taught at school that queer lifestyles were normal. It was literally illegal for teachers to promote it as ‘acceptable.’ 

For many of us we only had the television to teach us what normal and abnormal were, and the TV was no help. 

I didn’t really truly understand my sexuality until I was well into my 30s. I’m bisexual, and that meant I could place my queerness in a box and concentrate on the side of me, the side attracted to women that I’d been taught by culture to understand.

I wish I’d had Our Flag Means Death growing up. I wish I’d had something that layers queerness into its story in a way that is totally unremarkable –  a world where love flourishes regardless of gender. 

The tide is finally turning: Good Omens, Prime Video’s biblical fantasy, does the same thing. 

Then there’s Heartstopper and Gen V and Hacks and Big Boys and the new Interview With A Vampire and Sex Education and Feel Good. 

Shows where boys kiss boys and girls kiss girls and it’s all just part of life. OFMD might be sailing into the sunset, and I will miss it dearly, but it feels like the wave of queer TV it washed in on, is here to stay. 

It’s long overdue.

Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing Ross.Mccafferty@metro.co.uk. 

Share your views in the comments below.

MORE : Brilliant show with 94% on Rotten Tomatoes is axed after two seasons

MORE : Disney Plus hit with backlash for cancelling show with 94% Rotten Tomatoes score

MORE : Significant portion of LGBTQ+ characters in recent TV shows not returning for next season

Entertainment – MetroRead More