Taika Waititi Says Our Flag Means Death Sidestepped A Very American TV Trope

"Our Flag Means Death" is a series worth celebrating. The popular and beloved Max Original is a bit of a genre-blender, mixing high-seas action and adventure with sweet comedy, sincere moments of drama, and tender romance. It's that last aspect of the series that helped it take the world by storm in 2022, as the show surprised audiences by revealing itself to be a gentle queer love story between two male pirates who are, on the surface, complete opposites.

Much has been said about the way "Our Flag Means Death" presents queerness; the show is part of a small handful of series — "What We Do In The Shadows" and "The Great" being two others — that don't present heterosexuality as a default. Instead, the pirate ship-set comedy imagines a world (partly based on historical fact) in which people can have romantic or sexual relationships with one another regardless of gender, all without facing down homophobia from most of those around them. It's at once a great accomplishment and something other shows could easily do, and it's one of the things the cast and crew of the show love about it, too.

In a recent virtual panel discussion for Outfronts, series star and pilot episode director Taika Waititi explained that the lack of period-specific homophobia is refreshing. "If it was any other film it would be like, 'We can't kiss because it's 1952! It's frowned upon, and we can't hold hands!'" he said. "It'd be just all about that, and this is not about that at all." The show actually features multiple queer couples, from amateur pirate Stede (Rhys Darby) and scourge of the seven seas Blackbeard (Waititi), to non-binary fighter Jim (Vico Ortiz) and sweetie pie Olu (Samson Kayo), to the quippy, open pairing of Lucius (Nathan Foad) and Black Pete (Matthew Maher).

While some characters in "Our Flag Means Death" ooze toxic masculinity, they're framed largely as villains, in the long — but annoyingly infrequent — tradition of coding only the bad guys as homophobes that dates all the way back to "M*A*S*H." "I love that no character is like, 'Oh, are those two holding hands? What's up with that?!'" Waititi says. "They're like, 'Oh, I knew they'd get together,' all the peripheral characters." As co-star Con O'Neill, who plays perpetually angry first mate Izzy Hands in the series, puts it, gay love stories have "never been just about the process of falling in love, it's always been about the barriers. F*** that, we're beyond that!"

In the same interview, Waititi also spoke about how nice it is to see a show that's able to be inclusive without constantly gesturing back to its own inclusivity. "I think one of the best things about the show is that nobody has a speech about inclusivity and representation in the show," Waititi says. Though he doesn't cite any specific titles, he says this seems to be a very American phenomenon. "They're always going, 'You know what, it's okay to be different!' It's such an American [thing]." If you've ever seen a Netflix Original geared toward teens, or anything Ryan Murphy has ever made, you'll know just what Waititi is talking about.

He went on: "Every American show it's like, they have that monologue to explain to audiences what they're watching, and I love that this show doesn't do that." Fans love it too, as "Our Flag Means Death" has already inspired countless works of fanart, cosplay, original writing, and more. The series has had an impressively massive fan response, and it's in part because of all the reasons Waititi cites here. 

Eager fans waiting for currently-separated Stede and Ed to reunite will have to wait a while longer, though, as "Our Flag Means Death" does not yet have a season 2 release date.