‘Our Flag Means Death’ Renewed For Season 2 After An Inexplicable Delay

It’s been trending for nearly two months as fans rally to “save” a show that by all accounts, never really should have needed saving at all. But HBO Max announced yesterday, that of course pirate comedy Our Flag Means Death would be coming back for season 2, 69 days after the season 1 finale.

It remains unclear why fans were made to sweat for this long. My initial theory was that maybe Taika Waititi was just very busy, very busy guy that he is, but interviews with him did not seem to indicate this was the case, and he was waiting around just like everyone else. I see three options here:

• HBO made fans wait on purpose to create the kind of attention-grabbing online “movement” that spawned from the lack of renewal for so long. Then they get rewarded for “listening to the fans.”
• HBO really did have business-y negotiations to hammer out with budgets, salaries, programming slates and that kind of boring stuff, and Our Flag was a puzzle piece that took two months to fit in.
• HBO waited for the first day of Pride to announce it, with the show being a massive favorite of LGBTQ viewers thanks to its central gay pirate romance (and two other gay pirate romances besides that one).

Two of those are somewhat disingenuous, but who knows. It’s been a good couple weeks for LGBTQ fan-favorites, as Netflix (before Pride) also renewed Heartstopper for two more full seasons, putting fans’ fears at ease that the service was about to cancel another beloved show for no real reason other than something vague about “metrics.”

As I said months ago, similarly, it would have made little sense for HBO Max not to pick up Our Flag Means Death for season 2. Compared to much of their fare, its extremely low budget with Taika Waititi being the only bonafide star in the cast, and most better know him as a director. The explosion of fan art and tributes to the show was like nothing most series ever see. And in general, many appreciated the surprise that this seemed like it was just going to be a pirate version of What We Do In The Shadows, another Waititi project, but instead blossomed into one of the most compelling romances of the year…that happened to be between two pirate captains.

MORE FROM FORBESWhy ‘Our Flag Means Death’ Seems Destined For A Season 2 RenewalBy Paul Tassi

Season 1 of Our Flag ended on a steep cliffhanger with (spoilers) Blackbeard back to his old ways, and Stede and his crew marooned on an island. One character might be dead (Lucius) but I doubt it. This is still a comedy after all. They’ll find him floating holding onto a barrel or something, I’m not worried.

In any case, this should have happened a long time ago, but at least it happened period. There’s no return date set for the show yet, but barring any delays, it could be as soon as early next spring, with season 1 ending in March 2022. Stay tuned.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.