“Darlings, we always come first.”
In an early scene of Greta Gerwig’s Little Women adaptation, Florence Pugh’s Amy lays bare the reality of the 19th-century marriage market for women. “Don’t sit there and tell me that marriage isn’t an economic proposition, because it is,” she tells Laurie (Timothée Chalamet), reeling off the various pre-Suffragette rights she is not afforded.
The premise of that line alone is at the heart of Apple TV+’s new corseted period drama The Buccaneers, which sees a group of American socialites plunge into the marriage meat grinder of 1870s London.
The first three episodes, which are now available to stream on Apple TV+, run the gamut of matchmaking fare – there’s a wedding, courting, proposals and an elopement to cap it off.
The Bridgerton comparisons will be impossible to shrug off and, given the juggernaut success of that Netflix production, it is likely to have been a factor in the impulse to greenlight the adaptation of Edith Wharton’s unfinished novel.
When you put the two shows next to each other, there is enough to make them look like distant cousins at the very least. The casting is inclusive and the needle drops are anachronistically pop-centric – including the mighty monocultural force of Taylor Swift herself. The runtime is filled to the brim with parties, soirées and balls, each of the eight episodes framed around a big bash which never passes without some sort of hiccup.
Yet The Buccaneers does set itself apart from Bridgerton. The central premise of an Anglo-American culture clash – which does give rise to some lazy stiff-upper-lip British stereotyping – puts the gang of New York women at the show’s core. It’s this group of best friends, who two sets of sisters among them, who we’re first introduced to as Nan (Kristine Frøseth) tends to Conchita (Alisha Boe) on her wedding day.
Much like Little Women before it, the five girls are positioned as the emotional heart of the show from that opening episode, when they chink fizzing flutes and tell each other: “Darlings, we always come first.”
Not so simple in practice: they have huge bust-ups and mushy make-ups, but ultimately they rely on one another as they cope with the expectations of a new society around them.
It may initially seem like a female friendship drawn in simple and eternally happy-go-lucky terms. There are whole scenes where the quintet screech like teenagers trying to commune with cats or where spinning in endless circles appears to be something young women just while whole afternoons away doing.
Yet this is balanced with scenes of real emotional heft, as they face identity crises, public humiliation and marital woes.
It feels like it adds something Bridgerton lacks, given that its own depiction of sisterhood and friendship is often sacrificed at the alter of romance.
Daphne has had little to do with her sisters, Penelope loathes hers and season two’s core sibling bond between Kate and Edwina was dramatically ruptured under the alchemic power of Kanthony, only to be given an unsatisfying and unrealistic deus ex machina plaster job in time for the finale.
Certain female friendships on Bridgerton have flourished, but predominantly among the older – and automatically more sidelined – characters, where the competition for romantic partners no longer exists. It took until the spin-off Queen Charlotte to pull Bridgerton‘s peripheral bond between Lady Danbury and Lady Bridgerton into focus.
“What about Eloise and Penelope?” we hear you cry. But that double act has proved a fraught and fairly lopsided affair, with plot points that increasingly feel like a means of teasing out the Lady-Whistledown secret.
There is the plain fact that when you have a set of debutantes being appraised by the young, eligible men around them, as you do in both Bridgerton and The Buccaneers, there are always going to be women being pitted against each other.
It might be an issue that for a show billed as a gutsy period romcom, Nan’s love triangle is among the least interesting elements here. But it also gives The Buccaneers the avenue to make girl power the main event as opposed to an accessory to the romance.
After all, it is Nan and Conchita’s face off – “You are an attention-seeking mess!” – that feels like the third episode’s emotional climax, more so than when Nan accepts her marriage proposal, despite what the sweeping music cues try to tell us.
The Buccaneers lacks the bosom-heaving, swoon-worthy drama Bridgerton has perfected but it functions better when you see this less as a romance series and more as a platonic love story about female friendship and sisterhood.
The Buccaneers is streaming on Apple TV+.
