In Apple TV+’s Colorful Edith Wharton Adaptation The Buccaneers, Female Friendship Takes Center Stage

Apple TV+’s library of streaming originals has steadily expanded since its launch in 2019, featuring everything from successful comedies (Ted Lasso, Shrinking) and intriguing dramas (For All Mankind, The Morning Show), to erudite science fiction (Foundation), entertaining spy thrillers (Slow Horses), and however we want to categorize the glorious weirdness of Severance. Yet, despite its growing array of quality programs, the streamer hasn’t really done much in the realm of historical dramas. (And don’t get me wrong, the offbeat Dickinson was truly delightful, but it is most remarkable for all the ways it isn’t a typical period series.) 

That’s about to change with the arrival of The Buccaneers, an adaptation of Edith Wharton’s unfinished final novel of the same name, which has all the lush costumes, fabulous hats, swoony romances, and sweeping British landscapes any fan of PBS’ Masterpiece has come to expect from the genre. But this adaptation foregoes a prestige feel for youthful exuberance, and the end result is something that often feels as loud and messy as the lives of the girls at its center. It’s not perfect, but it’s an entertaining shot of adrenaline into a genre that could use quite a bit more of it. 

This Buccaneers clearly takes many of its visual and narrative cues from shows like Netflix’s Bridgerton rather than the original Masterpiece adaptation of Wharton’s novel, embracing an intersectional sort of female empowerment that features diverse casting, queer subplots, and sisterhood above all. The dresses are colorful, the soundtrack is thoroughly modern (and features more than one Taylor Swift track), and the scenery is absolutely stunning. And while the series features multiple romances, its focus remains squarely on the complex, often messy relationships between the young women at its center, who are allowed to be brash, cruel, strident, warm, selfish, and exuberant by turns. 

It is a period drama that is unabashedly for and about female viewers, one that recognizes that, even within a traditional story about finding a handsome man with a sizable estate to marry, there must be space for other kinds of female experiences and relationships. The Buccaneers may not give all the permutations of the girls’ friendships equal screentime, but their bond is the emotional linchpin that holds the show together, and in a genre that is often laser-focused on romantic love beyond all else, it’s joyous to behold. 

Granted, the show is not often very subtle about the larger points it’s trying to make. In this world, Americans are loud and boisterous, uninterested in doing things the way they have always been done. The English aristocracy is endlessly stuck up, often openly rude to those who stray from the path of what’s expected. Almost every major female character gets some line that feels like it’s from a basic college women’s studies course, a Feminism 101 mantra about how young women are human beings who deserve to be treated as such and who should be allowed to some degree of self-determination in their own lives. But for all its frequent clunkiness, it’s still a message that resonates, if only because it’s something that this genre has only recently begun to embrace. And here, the loud brashness that the Americans are so famous for often serves as the catalyst for necessary change, and the strength of their occasionally awkward platitudes about female empowerment is reflected in the very real agency they display in their own lives. These girls often make genuinely terrible choices. But The Buccaneers celebrates their right to make them on their own terms. 

The eight-part series (all of which was available to stream for critics) follows the stories of five best friends—Nan (Kristine Frøseth) and Jinny (Imogen Waterhouse) St. George, Conchita Closson (Alisha Boe), and Mabel (Josie Totah) and Lizzy (Aubri Ibrag) Elmsworth—whose loyalty above all is to one another. The daughters of the industrial nouveau riche, their families are sneered at by the old money New York elite, no matter how hard Mrs. St. George (Christina Hendricks) and Mrs. Elsworth (Viss Elliot Safavi) try to get them to come to their parties.