Black Sails was a series originally on Starz, a premium network in the same vein as HBO. While the rest of us were busy over there watching Game of Thrones at what was arguably the height of its popularity, Black Sails premiered as one of many competitors. This was the 2010s, the decade that many consider to be the “golden age” of television. Breaking Bad had ended, though Better Call Saul had began, Mad Men was winding down, and The Walking Dead was stumbling through its fifth season and lumbering on like an actual zombie. So many shows on various networks were duking it out for those sweet, sweet viewership numbers before streaming services managed to finally catch up. Funny enough, all of those aforementioned shows were on AMC, which at the time was a regular-old cable channel: free, as long as you already paid for cable.

I only really remember seeing anything about Black Sails when clips of it played as ads to buy a Starz subscription, and the same goes for Outlander (that show gets its own post on another day). As someone who has never paid for cable, I laughed at the thought of paying even more for every extra channel you wanted. Although here we are now, with Starz, HBO, Paramount, and more companies doing their thing, and there are the streaming services, adopting the same exact model so that people can have cable AND pay for Netflix, Disney+, and any other service they want on top of that.

Well, more than a decade after Black Sails premiered on Starz, it’s now on Netflix, and I managed to crawl across the finish line to complete the series. I left the last 15 minutes or so of the final episode sitting around for the longest time because I just couldn’t bring myself to watch the show anymore. Yet, at last, I’ve perservered. All of this isn’t to say that Black Sails is a bad show, but if Game of Thrones really screwed up toward the end of its run, then Black Sails snuffed out any momentum it had by its third season, and the fourth was truly a slog to get through.

Black Sails serves as a prequel to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, and it also involves many historical figures and actual events that took place. If you’re familiar with Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, then this setup will sound similar. The main, fictional character of that game, Edward Kenway, interacts with the very real pirates Blackbeard, Jack Rackham, Anne Bonny, and Charles Vane, among others. In Black Sails, the fictional characters of Treasure Island, from Captain Flint and John Silver to Billy Bones, also interact with Blackbeard, Jack Rackham, Anne Bonny, and Charles Vane. It’s the fun sort of thing that historical fiction can provide. Black Sails takes place both 20 years before Treasure Island and during the Golden Age of Piracy, as the show is set in the early 18th century.

A lot like other productions made for premium television, Black Sails can play up the violence, language, and sex that definitely can’t be included in a show for a normal network. For a show about pirates, one would certainly hope so. At the same time, however, pirate media can be done better than Black Sails. I can honestly admit that I enjoy the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies more than I enjoyed this series. Grittier and sexier doesn’t always equate to better.

Black Sails starts out interestingly enough, with John Silver joining Captain Flint’s crew and the characters wheeling and dealing with one another as they compete for a huge Spanish treasure and go up against the British Royal Navy as it seeks to bring the island of New Providence and the capital, Nassau, under its complete control once and for all. There are a lot of business and personal relationships between the characters to keep things lively, even diving into the politics of captaining a pirate ship and maintaining a crew. There’s intriguing backstories and histories to certain characters, especially Captain Flint.

It’s during season three and throughout season four that Black Sails tries to become too many different stories at once, continuing the war for Nassau with both the Spanish and the British, while involving Maroon communities (which is a topic interesting and complicated enough to merit its own show) and becoming a psychological and moral battle between Flint and Silver. The most intriguing and entertaining characters start getting killed off when they still have much to contribute to the overall plot. Black Sails can’t afford to give all of these facets the attention they deserve, instead muddling through the psyches of Flint and Silver. I have no doubt this is supposed to somewhat lead into Treasure Island, but it just gets so depressing and drawn out by the end. Meanwhile, for the actual historical figures like Rackham, Bonny, and even Mary Read once she’s introduced in the finale, the Golden Age of Piracy portion of the story feels like it’s ready to really take off. It ultimately feels like this show could have a) been even better without the Treasure Island characters, just focusing on a fictionalized retelling of real-life events, or b) two different pirate shows entirely.

Everything about the creation of Black Sails, from the costuming to the set designs — building real pirate ships! — to the acting, writing, and score are all very good and worth watching in the first two seasons, even much of the third. Unfortunately, it couldn’t keep up the pace and chug along at the high level it started out on, which I suppose is a tall order for many shows, particularly these days!