In the fine, funny, oddly sweet and surprisingly fact-based period comedy "Our Flag Means Death," beginning Thursday on HBO Max, Rhys Darby plays Stede Bonnet, a wealthy landowner who, in 1717, bored with his life, leaves his wife and children to become a pirate captain. It's a job for which he has no qualifications, and his image of which has been formed entirely from books. In his first raid, he manages to steal an apparently dead plant from some fishermen, wishing them good luck with their fishing as they depart. He has no taste for bloodshed, or other traditional requirements of piracy; it's as if this is the only way he can imagine going to sea.
Like the historical Bonnet, if likely for more aspirational, delicate reasons, Stede will fashion himself a Gentleman Pirate: "Why can't one be a gentleman and a pirate? … Polite menace, that'll be my brand."
The series was created by American writer David Jenkins and produced by the prolific Taika Waititi, who also stars as Blackbeard, to whom he brings a leonine grace. (He's just built that way.) Like Jenkins' wonderful, terminated-too-soon "People of Earth," which located a streak of banality among alien invaders, and Waititi's "What We Do in the Shadows," which brought vampires down to Earth, "Our Flag Means Death" takes an exotic subject and humanizes it, makes it more familiar through modern speech and attitudes. ("Lame," "I'm out," a fist bump.)
