Pirates, Sex, and Scandal: Starz’s ‘Black Sails’ is Poised to Conquer Netflix

Avast, me streaming mateys! For the perfect new spring binge watch has just dropped on Netflix today! Ten years after Black Sails became a beloved cult hit on Starz, all four seasons of the sexy, scandalous, addictive, and adrenaline-fueled show have landed on Netflix. While Black Sails has inspired legions of fans the world over, it never quite got to capture the massive audience that, say, fellow 2014 Starz launch Outlander did. Has the time finally come for Black Sails to become a sleeper streaming hit? We’d say so — especially since it’s the perfect time of years to escape to a steamy, sun-drenched action-adventure series full of fun.

Black Sails was created by Jonathan E. Steinberg and Robert Levine, and originally envisioned as a sort of prequel to Robert Louis Stevenson’s beloved pirate novel, Treasure Island. Whether you read the book as a kiddo (or just watched Muppet Treasure Island), you’ll know that story follows young Jim Hawkins as he falls under the spell of a ship’s charismatic peg-legged cook who turns out to be legendary pirate “Long” John Silver. Black Sails takes us back in time to when a young, hot, and fully ambulatory “Long” John (Luke Arnold) and his bountifully-bicep-ed buddy William “Billy Bones” Manderly (Tom Hopper) served under the enigmatic Captain Flint (Toby Stephens).

Even though Black Sails was designed as a literary prequel, some of its most loved characters were versions of real life pirates who sailed the Caribbean. Zach McGowan prowls around as Charles Vane while Clara Paget and Toby Schmitz steam up the screen as Anne Bonny and Jack Rackham. In later seasons, Ray Stevenson even showed up as Edward Teach, aka Blackbeard.

Okay, but the real reason why Black Sails was so cool was its mature approach to sexuality, violence, and storytelling. Sure, the pirates are hunting for legendary gold, as pirates do; but so much of the real drama came from their personal lives. Love affairs, secret obsessions, and routine betrayals kept Black Sails an engrossing soap opera. (Did we mention already the show was full of extremely hot people?)

As Bill Hader’s famous Saturday Night Live character Stefon would put it, Black Sails has everything: real life pirates, literary pirates, a hot lesbian governor played by Bridgerton Season 3 guest star Hannah New, vicious heroes and even more ruthless villains, the idyllic South Africa standing in for the colonial Caribbean, and, oh yes, Tom Hopper’s guns.

Black Sails is probably also going to have a helluva lot more fans soon, thanks to Netflix. Will you be one of them?