Girls Gone Wild? On Apple TV+’s “The Buccaneers”

WHAT DO Bikini Kill and Taylor Swift have in common? Edith Wharton, apparently. Though the first is a grungy feminist punk band that once entreated listeners to “suck my left one,” and the second is, well, Taylor Swift, they are both featured on the soundtrack to the new Apple TV+ television series, The Buccaneers (2023– ).

The show is loosely adapted from Edith Wharton’s final novel, which she never finished, and features a flagrant and often confusing mix of girlish whimsy and feminist politics. That mix is apparent from the very first episode, which opens in the same place the series concludes: at a wedding. In this case, it’s the wedding of Brazilian American debutante Conchita Closson (Alisha Boe) to a minor member of the British gentry, Lord Richard Marable (Josh Dylan). Conchita has her bridesmaids gather in a celebratory huddle where one of them, Jinny (Imogen Waterhouse), proclaims, “Girls, here is to a new world: marriages, men, parties.” It’s a new world, she means, for herself and the four other young women at the center of The Buccaneers, who proceed to parade in slow motion down a staircase, dancing while their names flash across the screen. Think Sex and the City, but with bustles.

This “new world” is not new, though—indeed, it’s decidedly antiquated, as it was even to Edith Wharton’s eyes when she wrote about it in the 1930s. Published in its uncompleted form in 1938, a year after Wharton’s death, The Buccaneers tells the story of five women who leverage their families’ American dollars to marry into the British aristocracy. It takes place in the 1870s, the era of Wharton’s own childhood, which is likewise the setting of her better-known, prize-winning novel, The Age of Innocence (1920). In The Buccaneers, however, she views it from a 60-year distance. The result is a work that blends historical fact with nostalgia-fueled fiction.

Take, for instance, the character Conchita, a hybrid creation based on two real-life figures: Consuelo Montagu, a Cuban American heiress who, in 1876, married a British lord and became the Duchess of Manchester; and Montagu’s namesake and goddaughter, Consuelo Vanderbilt, who followed in her godmother’s footsteps by marrying (at her mother’s behest) the Duke of Marlborough in 1895. The first Consuelo, whose Trinidad-born father was descended from Spanish aristocracy, had been a childhood friend of Wharton’s and an original member of a group of marriageable young women who called themselves, yes, “The Buccaneers.” The second, meanwhile, was something of a cause célèbre whose unhappy marriage and eventual separation from her husband was much discussed among Wharton’s circle of “Old New York” elites.

In the novel The Buccaneers, Wharton expands upon the suspicions that surrounded these real-life women and their high-profile marriages. She does this in part by making the fictional Conchita’s race a subject of debate, if only briefly. Lord Richard and Conchita marry hastily, before she has a chance to meet his family back in England, which prompts a panicked telegram from his mother: “Is she black his anguished mother Selina Brightlingsea.” The recipient of this telegram is Miss Testvalley, who vies for dominance as protagonist in Wharton’s novel. She is a former governess to the Marable family and current governess to another young “buccaneer,” Nan St. George. Miss Testvalley dismisses Lady Brightlingsea’s missive, though, with a laugh and a quip about the British gentry’s poor knowledge of geography: “Though there were two splendid globes, terrestrial and celestial, at opposite ends of the Allfriars library, no one in the house had ever been known to consult them.” Of course Conchita is not Black, Wharton is saying, and only someone who thinks Brazil is part of Africa—or who is totally paranoid about safeguarding the bounds of their own whiteness—would assume otherwise.

The real-life Consuelo Montagu, who was born Consuelo Yznaga in New York City, was not Black; neither was Consuelo Vanderbilt; and neither is the novel’s Conchita Closson (though she is described as “dusky”). The issue of Conchita’s potential Blackness is Wharton’s way of poking at the fragile architecture that undergirds modern whiteness. Indeed, it’s one of the most interesting parts of The Buccaneers—which is, in the end, probably one of Wharton’s least interesting books (though it might have succeeded in being more interesting had she been able to complete it).

In the Apple TV+ adaptation of The Buccaneers, though, Conchita is Black, played by the winsome and effervescent Alisha Boe. Following the trend set by series like Bridgerton, the show features color-blind casting, which highlights some of the tensions Wharton originally built into The Buccaneers. But whereas Wharton was clearly interested in the ways race, class, and gender intersect in the United States, showrunner Katherine Jakeways’s version of The Buccaneers appears only interested in staging the oldest of stories via the oldest of devices—namely, marriage. This limited focus drains the show of so much potential substance. It also makes for incoherent messaging about gender politics, as The Buccaneers swerves between crowd-pleasing criticisms of the 19th-century upper-class “marriage market” and empathetic support for its characters’ desires, which rarely extend beyond the idea of marriage.

That’s how we arrive at the unholy synthesis that is Bikini Kill and Taylor Swift. Both are used to amplify superficial messages about the trials of being a girl. They help broadcast those messages to a contemporary audience who, it is assumed, might otherwise miss them—as when Bikini Kill’s “Rebel Girl” provides the soundtrack to a scene in which the characters explore a hedge maze at a rural country estate. The maze (which, like the majority of Jakeways’s adaptation of The Buccaneers, does not feature in the novel itself) unsubtly symbolizes the girls’ efforts to navigate their own labyrinthine paths toward happiness, love, and marriage. Conchita, for instance, spies her husband in the maze and attempts to chase after him, only to find herself at an intersection, which reflects her indecision about whether to stay with Richard and suffer his oppressive family or to separate from him for the good of their marriage, their child, and her own sanity. Another character, Jean (Francesca Corney), encounters a dead end, underscoring her own failed attempts to secure a husband. None of these images exactly screams “revolt.” So who is the “rebel girl” being hailed here with the inclusion of this famous feminist anthem?

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Wharton, for her part, did see her young hero, Nan, as a rebel. But she never got far enough in writing The Buccaneers to detail the terms of that rebellion. The manuscript breaks off following Nan’s reluctant marriage to the Duke of Tintagel, though Wharton’s notes indicate that she planned to have Nan escape with her lover, Guy Thwarte, in a subsequent chapter. Meanwhile, letters reveal that Wharton was under pressure to rethink Nan’s rebellion. Her contract with her publisher, Appleton, covered serial publication in the magazine Woman’s Home Companion, whose editors, in reviewing Wharton’s outline for the book, objected to Nan’s running away with Guy. They worried that their conservative-leaning audiences would be offended by that outcome, should Wharton end up bringing it to pass.

This Nan St. George is a far cry from the heroine of Jakeways’s imagination (portrayed by Kristine Froseth) who, in the series, spends the night before her wedding to the duke in Guy’s arms. Nan’s entanglement within a rather predictable love triangle—her dithering between Rich Handsome Man A and (slightly less) Rich Handsome Man B—provides the majority of intrigue in The Buccaneers and invites more comparison to The Bachelorette than to Wharton’s novel.

But Nan’s dispiritingly conventional arc isn’t what’s wrong with The Buccaneers. Neither is it the show’s soundtrack, with its combination of take-no-prisoners feminism on the one hand and self-pitying femininity on the other. Swift’s music, in fact, is used effectively in the opening episode, when the camera wades through a sea of nervous-faced and identically clad debutantes who are preparing to be appraised and have their futures publicly auctioned. They come together to form a tide of white tulle and lace, flowing down a grand staircase to the tune of Swift’s “Nothing New.” Nan’s horror in witnessing this scene, and her sympathy for her sister and friends who are part of it, is apparent, but it doesn’t meaningfully complicate the course of her own narrative in the show. In this way, historical indeterminacy becomes self-serving anachronism: we are repeatedly told that Nan is a Strong Female Character™, but we are repeatedly shown a Nan whose actions are at odds with that profile.

No, what’s wrong with The Buccaneers is not that it contributes to the flattening of all female experience under the banner of a dubiously depoliticized feminism, though it is certainly guilty of that as well. What’s wrong is that it relies on superficial branding and blocks textual engagement because it doesn’t trust viewers enough to let them make sense of Wharton’s work, or to draw their own connections between past and present. We don’t need Taylor Swift music cues to show us how being a girl in the 1870s is like being a girl in the 2020s, if it even is. And we definitely don’t need Nan responding to a male bystander’s gauche comment, “Imagine them on their backs with their legs spread,” with the glib retort: “Or imagine them as human beings with no interest at all in your opinion and not caring whether you’re a king or a mister.” Whatever that means. It’s the show’s unwillingness to trust its audience—to deliver insights or delve into conflicts that are complicated enough to earn and compel that trust—that constitutes its chief deficit.

Though it professes, in the opening credits, to be “based on the novel by Edith Wharton,” Jakeways’s The Buccaneers maintains allegiance to Wharton in name and aesthetic only. Much like HBO’s The Gilded Age (2022– ), which prioritizes period aesthetics and forces them to mesh with questionable interpretations of history, The Buccaneers looks right for a Wharton adaptation. The dresses are beautiful, the settings and interiors resplendent, and even if Conchita’s poodle is dyed pink, well, she does have a poodle in the book. The show is not lacking in Wharton-inspired visuals. What it does lack is any meaningful understanding of what makes Wharton’s material worth adapting in the first place. It dispenses with or de-emphasizes details that Wharton used to expose the hypocrisies of her own time, in order to double down on the marriage plot. The adaptation then foils its own feminist aspirations by presenting the latter as “timeless.” As such, it appears to take place in a kind of narrative no-man’s-land—somewhere between the past that Wharton sought to make us understand in her novel and the present that has provided our occasion for revisiting it.

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One is driven to wonder, in fact, if it is because Wharton never finished writing The Buccaneers that it is so ripe for adaptation. After all, it isn’t the first time: The Buccaneers was previously serialized for television in the 1990s. That’s twice, and two more times than Wharton’s celebrated novel The Custom of the Country (1913) has ever been adapted for mainstream film or television. Indeed, The Buccaneers has appeared at an auspicious time, just as the renowned director Sofia Coppola’s hotly anticipated Custom of the Country project—which was to star Florence Pugh and also stream on Apple TV+—has been declared dead. In a recent New Yorker article, Coppola explained that Apple pulled funding for the series in part because their executives (who she describes as “mostly dudes”) didn’t “get” the book’s main character, Undine, and saw her as too “unlikable.” Such criticisms might explain the comparative popularity of The Buccaneers as an adaptable text, despite its many weaknesses. In not finishing the book, Wharton wasn’t able to develop her characters to the full apex of their “unlikability.” Instead, we get to speculate about where their stories might have led, allowing us to imagine that they might have headed in much more familiar and palatable, or “likable” directions.

Which brings us back to Bikini Kill and Taylor Swift. As female icons, they have, perhaps, a few things in common. But what distinguishes them may well come down to the question of likability. As anyone who is familiar with the album already knows, Bikini Kill (1992), the band’s first studio EP, opens in a famously abrasive manner. First comes squealing feedback from an amp and then singer Kathleen Hanna’s declaration, screamed into the microphone to elicit more feedback: “We’re Bikini Kill and we want revolution, girl-style, now!” Compare Hanna’s open aggression to Taylor Swift’s lack thereof—even when Swift’s lyrics are angry, it sounds as though she is mostly trying to keep her makeup in check and produce pleasing, likable sounds on her acoustic guitar–driven songs.

Certainly, this new version of The Buccaneers has some compelling moments. There is the scene where Conchita delivers her baby alone, without friends or family members or the presence of her husband (though, fortunately, there are plenty of servants on hand). There is Lizzy’s (Aubri Ibrag) sexual humiliation at the hands of a man who later marries her friend Jinny, and the shame that prevents her from speaking up and warning Jinny in advance. And there is Nan’s sacrifice on behalf of her sister in the final episode. These narrative developments, which have nothing to do with Wharton’s Buccaneers, add flashes of depth.

But the series suffers in trying to be too many things at once, and by trying too hard to be praised for them—which is to say, to be liked. It maintains this commitment to narrative likability and conventional romance even as it struggles to express an awareness of the pressures that force it to do so. For instance, in the fourth episode, Lizzy comes close to quoting a Bikini Kill song verbatim. The song “Feels Blind” includes the line “As a woman I was taught to always be hungry.” Lizzy modifies the lyrics slightly in telling Guy, “Women, we are taught to be hungry, to ignore that ache, so that you may be as small as possible, small enough for a man to notice you.” In this scene, and others like it, we glimpse the show’s feminist influences. But those influences, along with the messages that spring from them, lead only to the stalest conclusions. In delivering what its audiences have been conditioned to like, The Buccaneers misses out on opportunities to make them think.