“Love, it seems, has triumphed over virtue.”
– Renault, Casablanca
This year I completed two incredibly good television shows: the second (and final) season of Andor (2022 – 2025) and all four seasons of Black Sails (2014 – 2017). You don’t need me to tell you that one garnered considerably more online discussion than the other, but on recommending Black Sails to a work colleague recently, I found myself saying: “it’s just like Andor!”
It wasn’t until I got home that I thought back to my comment and wondered why exactly I had made that comparison. At first glance, the shows have very little in common: one is a sci-fi espionage thriller set in a galaxy far, far away; the other a historical epic set during a specific period in of own history (the Bahamas, 1715) with many characters based on real-life people. One comprises a small part of a sprawling, multi-million-dollar Disney franchise, while the other is a high-budget but relatively little-watched Starz show that ran for a respectable four years.
Yet they both boasted high production values, talented casts, and hefty themes concerning warfare, oppression, conviction, the moral and emotional cost of resistance, and the question of how far an individual can pursue a righteous cause before it’s deemed (either by themselves, the society around them, or the audience itself) that they’ve gone too far.
Both have ensemble casts full of morally complex main characters, which have set themselves for or against a powerful Empire, a struggle in which they’re called upon to make difficult moral decisions, are forced into conflict with their allies almost as much as their enemies, and face the impossible choice between protecting those they love, or sacrificing everything to the furtherment of a cause they fervently believe in.
More specifically, both narratives revolve around the idea of revolution – why people fight for it, and what price it exacts from those who engage in it. Just as Cassian Andor and the rebels of Star Wars are mired in espionage against the Galactic Empire, so too are the pirates of Black Sails gradually preparing for war against the British Empire.
I’ve seen each show described as a workplace drama, which is a fair assessment of each one if you take into account the interest both stories have in the concept of “the work” or “the cause”: from how a character can find themselves working with those they may dislike or distrust to achieve their goals, to how their friends, morals and relationships will inevitability be compromised because the work/cause is paramount.
Coincidentally, the shows are also prequels to pre-existing material: Andor to Rogue One (which is itself a prequel to the original Star Wars trilogy) and Black Sails to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.
Most importantly, both are extremely well-written. For this reason, I’m in the mood to delve further into the details of each show, how it is they’re in such simpatico with each other, and why each one is almost universally regarded as that most elusive of subjectivities: good. Sometimes, it’s just nice to gush about things you enjoy, and in doing so, I can hopefully provide you with a litany of reasons as to why you should watch each one.
SPOILERS FOR ANDOR AND BLACK SAILS
