The failure school of TV writing

I've finally done it: an essay finely calculated to annoy everyone, from fans of Our Flag Means Death to people who never want to hear those words again. I do have one friend who feels mid about OFMD, but she has a very powerful energy and it would be unsafe to try to imitate her at home. Generally, the show inspires either adulation or cringe, though I honestly think the correct response is C, Both. I know I've written about it before,  on the adulation side, but that was before the second season dropped and revealed that I was looking at a bad show that's partly good, not a good show that's partly bad. You'd think this would be an academic distinction, but it's really not – it's all about that moment when a thing can no longer pass for deliberate.

So once again, Our Flag Means Death is a Commonwealth comedy in the Mighty Boosh vein, but with continuity and less racist. It's an adaptation of the Wikipedia entry for Stede Bonnet, a rich dilettante pirate of the early 18th century. Specifically, it concerns Stede's complicated relationship with the pirate king Edward "Blackbeard" Teach, which is by turns adversarial, friendly, and romantic.

The New Zealand comic Rhys Darby is a strong anchor as the fluffy, affable, barely closeted Stede, giving the character an underlying desperation which never fails to be arresting. Taika Watiti as Blackbeard, though, is the reason the show is good. It's not because he's that good in it. In fact, I don't think he's good at all, just interesting, which is a different thing. A killer character design, a surprisingly shy mumble, an arsenal of mugging faces, an absurdist suicidality (one could be forgiven for thinking that Watiti based his performance on Dustin Hoffman in Hook, specifically the "don't try to stop me, Smee – try to stop me!" scene) – he's not much without the schtick. It's no surprise when Stede tells him late in season one, in post-shave horror, that he can't be Blackbeard without his black beard.

No, I think the reason Watiti is the heart of the show is that he's, of all possible things, an effective audience surrogate. Of course many creators believe deeply in an "audience surrogate" who's as bland as possible, but since most audience members identify as interesting, perhaps even as mysterious, a character like Blackbeard actually serves that purpose much better. World-weary, deeply depressed, fascinated by Stede's balls-out lunacy, he's in need of a good HBO sitcom, and here one is in front of him, embodied in a man he finds attractive. The show doesn't work when Stede is alone (which unfortunately is about a third of each season). There's nobody to watch him, to tell him he's great.

Watiti may be the making of the show, but he's also its undoing. He and Darby (good friends and mutual fans IRL) are so magnetic together that the show has no choice but to commit to their bond – to move past sitcom logic, take the two men seriously as characters, and make them kiss. Unfortunately, when asked to be serious, Watiti immediately becomes self-serious. His expression freezes like a camera-shy person taking a selfie. The writers can't think of what to do with him when the lens is fixed so firmly on his face; all they can think to do is make Blackbeard's alcoholism and depression overt, when they were already overt (there's nothing more annoying than the big reveal that the writers don't think you're picking up what they're putting down). Again, Blackbeard is a great supporting character, in the literal sense that he is here to support Stede, just as Watiti is here to support Darby. When you try to make him the second lead instead, you just end up with a dry, crumbled mess. There's just not enough there.

OFMD writes itself into a hilarious corner at the end of its first season, in which the lovers decide to run away together. Stede is struggling with coming out (a topic handled in an unapologetically modern sense), and panics, deciding to return to his wife without telling his lover. Once he's home, though, he and his wife agree to part; both of them are in love with other men. As part of their agreement, Stede will give his fortune to his wife and start over, penniless. Meanwhile, Blackbeard assumes Stede doesn't love him, and promptly resumes his old violent and self-destructive ways, committing several unforgivable crimes against characters we like in the process. As always with OFMD at its best, there's a hard kernel of truth here that could chip a tooth if you're unwary. Stede is a depressive who blames his own weakness for his pain; Blackbeard is a depressive who blames others for his pain, and for the brutal acts that result. This is a Mountain Goats song, of course, and not a great sign for a relationship, which is unfortunate for a show that's intentionally discarded the sitcom-logic card.

What do you do with season two? One of your romantic heroes has gone on a murder spree, in a show that really values human life and doesn't play death for anything but the blackest comedy. The other has lost his whole schtick of popinjay vanity and bottomless cash, which was such an enjoyable contrast to the desperate lives of the pirates around him. How do you get them back together without sitcom logic as your glue? How do you make the relationship work after Blackbeard has proved himself so genuinely violent, and so eager to treat his violence as his ex's fault? Or how do you make it not work, when the against-all-odds optimism of the relationship is what you've sold to the fans?

To be honest, I suspect the remainder of this season (five more episodes) will pull it out. OFMD, after all, pulled out of a similar creative tailspin halfway through its first season. Its writers and actors have a marvelous facility for rebuilding trust, even if it's frankly undeserved trust, by positing that things you know were accidental or badly done were, in fact, deliberate and well done. Maybe they'll bring the lovers together in a way that doesn't feel impossibly toxic. Maybe they'll have Blackbeard evolve enough to recognize that he's fucked this one. Maybe they'll even proceed to the historically tragic end of both men's lives, though that's a lot to do in five episodes (I suspect the show won't be renewed, and suspect the writers are planning for the same).

None of this changes the fact that OFMD is a case study in bad creative DNA – in the struggle to build a real ending off major contradictions of style and substance. These things can provide a beguiling tension at first. I love a sitcom founded on material as dark as this; I thought it was absolutely killer that the show had the courage to commit to the love story it couldn't help telling. But when your story is simultaneously about two queer pirates getting into anachronistic shenanigans, and about a guy who murders his lover's friend because he thinks he's been dumped, there's no way to give that a real ending. It's impossible to make it the statement of aboutness that every ending needs. No, an ending shouldn't be didactic (usually), but it is the moment when the writer shows you their hand and asks if it's a winning one. Was that an ambiguous story, a heroic story, a love story? So to speak, does it end in death or marriage? And will the audience agree or disagree? The conclusion of a story is a showdown between writer and audience, in which the author makes their intentions clear, and the reader decides whether to make a final leap of faith. Any ending the show has now will deny one of the two stories it's simultaneously telling, thus ringing false no matter what.

There are a lot of other bits of crumbling concrete in OFMD's foundations – call me sometime to hear my rant about how there are just too many pirates on this show, how you don't need two competent straight men, two guys with fringe beliefs, two prophetic lunatics, etc. – which also contribute to its struggles. But most of all, OFMD has written itself into a place where it's trying to be both a comedy and a tragedy (check out Blackbeard and Stede's competing hamartias). This can be done well, or there wouldn't be a word for it, but these oxen aren't yoked here: it's just trying to be both of them, not both of them together.

This has been a long, chatty piece about something I've covered before, but these fascinating failures or baffling successes are always what teach me the most about writing. You can't learn as much from someone who nails it. If they nail it, it's usually because they're playing a very particular talent to the hilt – you can't do what they do, just as they can't do what you do. And you certainly can't learn much from someone who blows it. But someone who just keeps forging ahead with something that shouldn't work, and usually doesn't work, but sometimes works so well that it draws a passionate cult following? That's when we go to school.