None of this is necessarily a dealbreaker. The US players aren’t used much more efficiently: among the familiar faces who are either a mark of a quality production or a sign of a certain relaxed chumminess in the casting, depending how charitable you’re feeling, are Fred Armisen, Leslie Jones and Kristen Schaal, all given silly little guest roles they handle with ease. Joel Fry looks as if he will enhance the action as a pessimistic lute-twanging bard (“To death we go/To certain death we go/Our one hope being that our certain death ain’t slow”), but then the show forgets to make him keep doing that and he fades into the background. Ewen Bremner is a wild-haired veteran who barely conceals his desire for every crisis to descend into cannibalism, which is a nice idea, but then that’s it. Having hired an enviable repertory of some of UK telly’s funniest people, however, it proceeds to hand them roles that range from indistinct to virtually invisible, wasting them like a bored billionaire who has bought the best box of chocolates in the Selfridge’s food hall and is now spitting each one out after a single chew. His crew think they have the worst boss ever, in a politely understated sort of way.īut what a crew! Our Flag Means Death has superb taste in British comedy performers. His anachronistic take on piracy – he wants to end the “culture of abuse” in the industry – means he is not exactly knee-deep in stolen doubloons. It’s 1717 and, as he ineptly helms his magnificent ship the Revenge, Stede pays his crew a steady salary rather than the traditional no-booty, no-dinner model, and encourages his men to talk about how violence makes them feel, lest their mental health suffer. Despite the period setting we are, it seems, drifting in 21st-century alternative comedy’s comfort zone. There’s no settled name for this type of post-Office ensemble comedy, but you know it as soon as you see it: lots of mumbled irony, diffident delusion and offhand passive aggression. Not that “punchlines” is quite the right word for the comedy payoffs here. And if it doesn’t, 20 seconds of former Flight of the Conchords star Darby as Stede Bonnet, a nervous fop with benign misapprehensions about his own abilities and the world’s willingness to be impressed by him, will give you the measure of Our Flag Means Death and let you join in with the punchlines. It gives you a big hint as to the whole style of it, the tone of it, the structure of the jokes. Here’s the thing that makes this series inessential, although it’s hard to dislike: if you’re at all well versed in the TV comedy of the past 15 years, the above summary doesn’t just tell you what the show is about. In Our Flag Means Death (BBC Two), a new HBO ensemble comedy executive-produced by Taika Waititi, Rhys Darby plays an ineffectual 18th-century aristocrat who tries to reinvent himself as a pirate but isn’t cut out for it.
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