While Black Sails pushed the boundaries with their female cast, they still manage to keep them grounded in reality. For instance, in Black Sails you have the female pirate Anne Bonny but it is always clear that she is a woman in a mans world and can be easily overpowered at any time, so she needs to remain cunning. Crossbones however, just ignores reality and injects modern fantasies of women. I rolled my eyes in the first battle sequence which included a black female pirate overpowering multiple men during a ship boarding. It gets worse with Blackbeard's right hand being a highly educate women in the Caribbean who can break ciphers? These sorts of feminist fantasies always ruin historical shows. I kept finding myself distracted throughout the first episode and not caring about what was going on since it felt like it was filmed on a Hollywood set and not on a Caribbean island. End result: Crossbones does not hold a candle to Black Sails, which is a gritty, much more realistic take on pirates.
Review of Crossbones
