Crossbones V Black Sails

Crossbones wasn't great, but at least there was a good bit of snappy dialog, the plot stayed on track, Teach was pretty interesting, and I actually cared about the fates of some of the characters.

On the other hand, the scripts for Black Sails are unnecessarily muddy and inane, the 'plot' was almost completely obscured, and I wouldn't feel a drop of sorrow if any character perished. I suffered through several episodes, but couldn't even finish the first season.

Black Sails is much better... Violent and dirty as those days must have been. Crossbones is (how I would call it) "Network" Clean, so totally unrealistic.

Black Sails is currently being shot in Cape Town, South Africa, where I live and work in the film industry. Many of my friends have worked on it in supporting roles. It's a good story and some of the performances are very good, but the writing leaves something to be desired - the dialogue is awful, with the writers putting modern English and swearwords into the mouths of 18th century people - and technically it's an utter abortion, complete with very cheap and seriously nasty CGI. I happen to know a lot about the period, about sailing in general and about ships of that period, and almost every time a ship turns up on screen or there's a battle, I can see errors. Some of them are so elementary as to be ludicrous, such as a shot of a ship at full sail with the sails filled, facing right to left on screen - and the flags on the tops of the masts are blowing left to right. These kinds of idiocies show a total lack of understanding of the medium, of the technical aspects of ships and sailing and of the time period, and more, they show a complete lack of interest in trying to make the series accurate. Instead it relies on gruesome scenes of violence, explicit sex and full frontal nudity of both sexes to get cheap thrills. Such a disappointment.

On the other hand, Crossbones is a far superior production. It has some great writing, a far closer approximation of the dialogue and vocabulary of the time, and the scenes involving ships and battles are nearly faultless. The performances in some cases are not that great. Julian Sands looks like he's desperately holding in a bad case of diarrhoea in basically every scene he's in, but he's the exception rather than the rule. Generally it looks, feels and flows much more comfortably and with much more authority than Black Sails.

Crossbones is so much better there's almost no comparison.

definitely Black sails :) not only cuz its prequel story to one of my favorite books :D

"Black Sails" is grittier and more realistic in terms of overall "look" (some of the "Crossbones" characters are WAY too pretty and clean to be ruthless pirates) but Malkovich is flat-out great as Blackbeard so I'm giving the edge to "Crossbones". Hopefully if it's renewed there'll be some more great stuff from him in the role.

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Crossbones I didn't like at all, I forget why as it's been a ? now, but currently watching Black Sails and it really is outstanding. During the latest episode one thing struck me, there's zero cheese. Strong characters and a storyline that doesn't insult to be viewer, one of my favourite shows at the moment.

Some of us don't have access to Black Sails so the choice is Crossbones or no pirates at all.

As long as you have no problems with complete historical inaccuracy the Crossbones is a lot of fun. They certainly didn't stint on it. For me, not enough ships and ocean (I'm sure because of budget restrictions) but it was still a visual delight.

Personally, I think the could have cast better than Malkovich but since he's the only recognizable big name in this I understand why they did it. Probably the only one they could get to sell the limited series. He did OK even though he seemed to be a bit out of his element and his accent was as changeable as the wind.