Summary
It’s a genuine attempt to tell a story to the viewer without making it sound like a monotone documentary.
Netflix documentary series The Lost Pirate Kingdom season 1 was released on the streaming service on March 15, 2021.
It’s appalling how much I did not know about the history of pirates before I watched this documentary series. My history lessons at high school were lacking, obsessively leaning towards the heroics of Britain in World War 1 & 2. The strongest lean was fictionalized in the form of Pirates of the Caribbean, and even that is laced in fantasy.
Netflix’s The Lost Pirate Kingdom delves into the history post War of the Spanish Succession, which left thousands of Caribbean privateers unemployed, and a treasure wreck brought plenty of opportunities — Season 1 narrates how this formed a republic and a surprisingly robust one at that.
Of course, there’s no real-life footage, so The Lost Pirate Kingdom relies on dramatized reimaginings of what the main players looked like; from a production perspective, it’s impressive — it’s a genuine attempt to tell a story to the viewer without making it sound like a monotone documentary. Even the soundtrack has a tinge of Pirates of the Caribbean, giving a sense of adventure between each episode.
The 6-chapter docuseries provides the golden era of piracy, where the lines blurred between legalities; the narrator describes how the treasure sometimes had 10 lifetimes worth of value; it’s abundantly clear why a lucrative pirate republic was formed. History has a way of repeating cycles of the rich versus the poor, and the dynamics that are formed — The Lost Pirate Kingdom conjures a convincing, archive-led tale.
The only downside to the documentary series is that The Lost Pirate Kingdom does lull; the binge factor is reduced by the same pattern of music, narrator, and dramatized scene; it works on this cycle, moving the audience along down the timeline, but it does eventually lose its entertainment value. However, The Lost Pirate Kingdom is worth a shout, and if you are not arrr-ing afterward, then this documentary series has failed.
