The Buccaneers Season 2 Gives Its Mature Female Characters a Chance to Shine
The cast and creatives behind The Buccaneers discuss putting the series' older female characters center stage.
(Photo: Apple TV+))
The Buccaneers is a period drama that’s all about youth. In a world were costume dramas are often assumed to be stiff and overly serious—all those corsets and quiet pining!— the Apple TV+ series is the complete opposite, an unapologetic riot of noisy, colorful, youthful excess that’s all about friendship and the particular messy escapades that so often come with coming of age. The story of a group of American heiresses who head to England in the hopes of marrying titled British aristocrats, the series depicts a group of friends who crash headlong into the upper echelons of British society and must face the harsh truths of growing up that follow.
The series’ second season turns things up to eleven, powering through plot twists, romances, secrets, and betrayals at a positively breakneck pace. It features contemporary pop ballads, wildly anachronistic costuming choices, and plenty of youthful indiscretions, even as most of its leads are tentatively navigating their first steps into the world of marriage and children. But despite its overtly youthful focus, The Buccaneers Season 2 still makes time to do something that feels rather remarkable: Focus on the mature women of its story.
Perhaps this shouldn’t feel as surprising as it is, given that The Buccaneers is a show that’s so unapologetic about the idea that there must be space for other kinds of female experiences and desires beyond simply finding a man with a title and a sizable estate to marry. But allowing, let’s just call it “women of a certain age” to drive their own stories is something vanishingly rare in this particular genre space—heck, on television in general—and that deserves to be celebrated whenever possible. And The Buccaneers doesn’t just allow one of its older women to have the spotlight, but several.
“With all of the mothers and older characters in the show—with the Dowager Duchess, and Mrs. St. George and even Lady Brightlingsea and Mrs. Elmsworth, actually—that you start out thinking that these are just the “mum” characters and that you know what those kinds of figures in a period drama are meant to be like,” series creator, writer and executive producer Katherine Jakeways tells Paste. They’re those kinds of people. There’s nothing new here.”
But The Buccaneers Season 2 purposefully chooses a different path. From widowhood and new romances to long-held family secrets, the series’ older generation women have plenty of drama and problems of their own to deal with in Season 2, all of which impact their relationships with their daughters (or daughters-in-law).
“As we grow up, something we discover about our own mothers is that they had lives of their own. They fell in love, and they made mistakes. They did good things and bad things and feel good about some [of their choices] and regret others,” Jakeways continues. “Obviously, the girls and the boys and the love stories are such a big part of the show, but I feel that this season we’ve also really fleshed out the older characters and leaned into the push and pull of those relationships.”
For Mrs. St. George (Christina Hendricks), that means navigating the lifetime’s worth of lies that are finally coming home to roost. Now that she’s finally succeeded in getting her daughter Nan (Kristine Frøseth) married, she must deal with her crumbling relationship with her unfaithful husband, to the surprise appearance of her younger sister Nell (Leighton Meister), who is also secretly Nan’s biological mother.
“I think it’s wonderful,” Hendricks says.”I assumed at the beginning [of this show] that our demographic was going to be younger women, and it actually covers a much larger age range than you’d expect. And I think it’s nice to see storylines with different age groups. And I was excited to hear what they pitched for [Mrs. St. George] this season, it felt like an important one. It’s a reflection of how far we’ve come and how far we need to go.”
The decision to make Nan’s birth mother someone much closer to the family than anyone probably expected “came really early on” during the season’s planning process.
“We asked ourselves: how do we make this interesting? Why do we care? The colonel has probably had a million affairs with different women. We wanted it to be someone who felt worthy of Nan and whom we felt the audience would care about,” Jakeways says. “The idea that it was Nell was especially fascinating because she’s Mrs. St. George’s younger sister and we could play with all the ways that they’ve framed this situation over the 19 years since Nan was born—how they’ve made each other the villain in this story and have blamed each other and grown apart and protected their own [roles] in that story.”
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