Behind the Scenes: The Buccaneers

Girls with money, men with power. A group of fun-loving young American girls explode into the stiff upper lipped London season of the 1870s, kicking off an Anglo-American culture clash in Apple TV series The Buccaneers, reports Adrian Pennington.

 The ensuing drama is played out to a soundtrack featuring female musicians from Taylor Swift to Olivia Rodrigo. “There is the intent from ground zero to reinvent the genre and let it cut loose from the corset strings of period drama tropes,” said Oliver Curtis BSC (Netflix’s Stay Close) who helped design the show look and shot episodes 1 and 2 with director Susanna White (BBC’s Bleak House). “It’s about a collusion of attitudes and sensibility which, from a stylistic point of view, could take you in lots of different directions.”

Inspired by Edith Wharton’s unfinished final novel of the same name, from series creator Katherine Jakeways, the eight-part drama is produced by Forge Entertainment and stars Norwegian actresses Kristine Frøseth and Alisha Boe with Mia Threapleton and Christina Hendricks (Mad Men).

Curtis had not made a period drama since...

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Centre L-R - Cynthia Erivo (as Elphaba), Director Jon M. Chu, and Ariana Grande (as Glinda) on the set of Wicked

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