What if Meghan Markle’s royal ordeal was a teen period drama?

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The Buccaneers
★★★★
Apple TV+, from November 8

“It’s gonna look like me, it’s not gonna look like them – what if they look at my baby the same way they look at me?” frets Alisha Boe’s fiery (and extremely pregnant) Conchita late in the first episode of Apple TV’s The Buccaneers, fearing further alienation from her new high society British in-laws who’ve not taken kindly to her brash, free-spirited American ways. “Oh, so she’s Meghan Markle,” you’ll casually point at your TV and giggle, and suddenly this earnest period drama accumulates a strange, addictive appeal.

Created by UK actress and comedian Katherine Jakeways, The Buccaneers is an adaptation of Edith Wharton’s final novel, set in the 1870s and following a group of American girls sent over to England by their new money parents with the aim of marrying into British aristocracy so as to elevate their family’s standing in New York society back home. It’s a world built on gross tradition, where girls are but a means to an end, forced to parade for louche, foppish redheads in the hopes of (unhappily) marrying into status.

Kristine Froseth as Nan St George, The Buccaneers’ spiky lead.Credit: Apple TV

Our guide, thankfully, is the spiky Nan St George, played with an easy charm by Kristine Froseth (from Netflix’s underrated Lost-but-with-teens dystopian drama, The Society). “I was never supposed to be the main character,” Nan narrates by way of introduction, scoffing at the limiting society nonsense her mother (Christina Hendricks) is trying to steer her and her sister Jinny (Imogen Waterhouse) towards. But, of course, her rebellious ways are catnip to at least two dreamy, sensitive suitors, and she soon finds herself swept into the murky waters where love, duty and self-preservation jostle for dominance.

Like Apple TV’s best show yet, that other period drama Dickinson, The Buccaneers draws its endearing surge from its youthful, anachronistic energy. It might indulge the odd cringe cliche (oh look, there’s the handsome duke emerging all wet-shirted from the ocean), but it’s not quite your mum’s period drama – and it’s way more barbed than its predecessor, a 1995 adaptation starring Carla Gugino as Nan and Mira Sorvino as Conchita.

The show’s theme song, for starters, is a clever cover of LCD Soundsystem’s North American Scum, a sardonic nod to the righteous, disruptive energy of our scrappy Meghans. When the second episode shifts the action to a party retreat in Cornwall, where the girls go wild to Japanese Breakfast’s Be Sweet, I was sold – and there were still swooning, dramatic cues from Taylor Swift, Phoebe Bridgers, and more to come.

The show’s solid taste extends to its gorgeous set design, which flits back and forth between New York’s opulent brownstones and the blooming UK countryside (the Scottish coast doubles for Cornwall), and what’s probably the most attractive TV cast since Riverdale. Everything about this show is fun to look at, and its spiritual allegiance to a transgressive, convention-flouting generation makes for a charming time. Does Piers Morgan have an Apple TV subscription? He’s gonna lose his shit over this one.

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