you need to be watching the buccaneers

a deranged show for deranged times

I should be talking about my trip to Portugal, or about the fact that the world feels so depressing I want to cry/scream for at least three and a half hours every day, or about how Coldplay’s Chris Martin is actually a comedian, but the thing is, we're going to talk about The Buccaneers today. Oh, Clara, do you mean Edith Wharton's unfinished final novel, I can hear you asking, and oh, how to explain to you that yes, but only in the vaguest, most faint of ways, which is how The Buccaneers (Apple TV) team surely—surely—intended this deeply loose adaptation of said novel, controversially finished in 1993 by Marion Mainwaring.

Get used to the number of italics on this post. Nothing has ever asked for italics to a greater degree than The Buccaneers, a television show that begs the question "what if you and your girlfriends were barely out of teenagedom and moved from America to England in 1877 and also you were on mushrooms the entire time and also every British person you met was broke?"

It's an incredible piece of work.

I was trying to think of how I could explain to you the insanity that one is immediately imbued with once one hits "play" on this criminally underpromoted show (I want a job on Apple TV's marketing team soooo bad, like I just *know* they send one email a day and say that's enough productivity for today I think), and the best illustration, I believe, is the theme song, a cover of LCD Soundsystem's "North American Scum" that sounds, and I say this with both respect and awe, like one of the royalty-free songs Netflix digs out of the Selling Sunset trenches. The fact that the title card is a neon sign à la 2013 matcha shop in a quickly gentrifying neighborhood? God, it's too perfect.