Tinotenda Taaziva

I have watched 5 episodes so far and I understand why someone would like the Buccaneers. It's fun and the characters all have easy to understand motivations for what they do. Nan and her gang are hyper (if not at times obnoxiously loud) and carefree without ending up falling to the boy-ish, I'm-too-free-to-be-feminine way. The love interests are decent and there are some important themes for girls in the target audience to take heed of. However, something I haven't seen anyone truly talk about is the acting in this. It's so lifeless. I don't think they are bad actors per-say but combined with the clearly questionable directing choices, it does not look good on them. Every scene with Theo had me speeding it up because I couldn't bear the lack of variation in any of his speech. The same with Mabel

I thought I had read the book a while back but I didn’t remember anything except that there was a love triangle. To say the least, the show was disappointing. The characters made choices that didn’t make sense and were hard to support, but also somehow cliche and predictable. The dialogue basically spelled out “book adaption” which happens a lot with these series. The main character played the stereotypical nerdy girl who acts as if she’s never seen a Y chromosome in her life and the love interests weren’t enticing enough. I wish I had read the book so I could have compared the main character because you can tell a lot of the interesting parts of the character were lost when moving her from paper to the screen. As far as the love triangle goes, Netflix did its thing where there is a clear better, healthier option and the main character picks the other one for no reason (which I’m sure happens in the book as well but is better justified). honestly this is a plot device I think we should put to bed since now there is a pattern where there is the ‘better one’ and ‘the one mc picks’. It has taken out the anticipation and excitement that made love triangle fun in the first place. I did enjoy the settings though. The atmosphere was also well done. It was clear how the series was set in a small, friendly town.