The Lost Pirate Kingdom

I'm a sucker for anything Pirate related. When I first saw Netflix was working on a Pirate show my head went straight to Black Sails and instantly was excited. Later I learned this was going to be a docu-series so I was slightly disappointed but it was still about Pirates so I was in!

The show has its flaws, there is a lot of repetition but highlights some important events 1716-1718 of piracy and in general is an enjoyable watch.

An enjoyable documentary on the age of pirates. Re-enactments felt authentic and paired well with interviews and narration. The narrator had a fun tone that carried well throughout. Interesting information and the whole series had a good flow.

This documentary-series is slow, over acted, inconsistent and with a lot of filler time that personally bored me. I thought I was going to see something similar to what Netflix did with the Samurai documentary, which I thought was an interesting and different approach to watching a documentary where the story was told in a very clear way and with novelistic elements that worked well to give it the feel of a TV series.

The scope of this documentary are roughly two years during the year 1716 - 1718 and then mainly about the pirates that sailed from Nassau. It has a total of 6 episodes of 40 minutes, so I thought that it would had enough time to really flesh out the period. But the way this documentary has been structured means that something has to repeated no less than four times. First - it is told by the narrator, then it is acted out by the actors, then a historian has to comment on it and the next episode is has to be repeated in case you have forgotten. So this documentary is pressed for time. It will mention the war of succession, but will not explain it, it will tell you nothing of the technology, ships, warfare, politics or religion of the time period. It focusses so much on Great Britain that it seems like there are barely any other nations involved. So what you are left with are summaries of acts of famous English pirates. It is competently acted and the special effects have been done well. But as a source of information it feels lacking and shallow.

I don't understand why anybody is comparing this to a fictional show like Black Sails. The narration just contributes to the show as a historical story versus a non fiction story. Whether the whole story is completely accurate or not, it tells the story of how the pirates of the Caribbean legends were born. Besides the obvious gaps in great graphics that are available nowadays, I thought it was really really good