Apple TV+’s New Show Tries to Turn Edith Wharton Into Bridgerton . I Couldn’t Stop Watching.

Edith Wharton’s unfinished novel The Buccaneers was completed and published in 1938, after the author’s death in France the previous year. In the book, which is a heck of a read and the basis for a frothy new adaptation on Apple TV+, five wealthy New York girls with “new money” fathers wend their way into British high society, parlaying one girl’s marriage to an impoverished lord in order to make their entrée. Their friendship—an alliance, really—is a central theme in the novel. Like pirates, they hunt in a merry group, ravaging the English social scene. Eventually, they become wives of titled and ambitious British husbands who either need their money or are drawn to their ebullience and freethinking innocence.

Wharton, like those husbands, admires these brash young women. In an early passage, the novelist describes them as a “blushing bevy, … sway[ing] across the threshold … like a branch hung with blossoms”; in another instance, they are a “circle of nymphs.” Her buccaneers are not always perfect—some of them come to adopt the worst of British society’s hierarchical habits—but they are a force for historical change, “a blast of outer air [that freshens] the stagnant atmosphere” of the British drawing room. And Annabel St. George, known as Nan, who emerges as the central character in the second half of the book, has all the best qualities of American girls as Wharton sees them: lack of pretense, originality of thought, idealism, loyalty.

You can see why Apple picked this book to adapt. Bridgerton viewers—which is to say, fans of zhuzhed-up period romances that are funnier and sexier than something you might watch on PBS or the BBC—are the target audience. (In the first episode of The Buccaneers, the camera pans over some wisteria growing on a fancy New York mansion, and you have to wonder if it’s a nod to the Netflix series.) Throw in the humor and drama of the transatlantic cultural conflict, the evolving circumstances of the central friendship, and so many marriage plots you’ll lose track partway through, and you’ve got this lavish-looking production, helmed by the British actor and writer Katherine Jakeways. Like Bridgerton, it features a cast made up mostly of extremely gorgeous young unknowns. (Christina Hendricks, in the role of mother to two of the Americans, is, for most viewers, likely to be the only familiar name in this lineup.) Kristine Froseth, who plays Nan St. George, is particularly perfect-looking, with the wide eyes and fresh complexion of a cartoon ingenue. With her friends Conchita (Alisha Boe), Mabel (Josie Totah), and Lizzy (Aubri Ibrag), as well as her sister Jinny (Imogen Waterhouse), Nan romps through ballrooms and drawing rooms, scandalizing duchesses and marchionesses and making all the British girls envious of their freedom.

The vibe is “college party,” with a lot of the humor and sass coming from scenes in which the buttoned-down Brits succumb to the American girls’ habits of sexy dancing and spontaneous swimming-hole visits. In this, the show often seems inspired by Dickinson’s house party episode, which offered a perfect old-new visual mix of people wearing too many fussy 19^th-century clothes getting drunk and down. The high-spiritedness of the buccaneers is unflagging, and the show’s loud, pointedly anachronistic soundtrack—all modern pop and rock music tailor-made for Olivia Rodrigo fans, no fussy old stuff—tries to keep up.

Many de-Wharton-izing changes are made to the material. This season of the show drastically reduces the role of middle-aged governess Laura Testvalley (Simone Kirby)—considered by some critics to be the central character in Wharton’s novel, with a significant story arc of her own—using her only to move the young people’s relationships along. The young Duke of Tintagel, whom Wharton gives the unattractive first name of Ushant and describes as wholly mediocre, becomes the dreamboat Theo (Guy Remmers), an art-loving hunk with broad shoulders and CW-quality eyes; we first meet him emerging from the Cornish sea, water streaming down his bare torso.

The love triangle between Theo, Nan, and Guy Thwarte (Matthew Broome)—a fun-loving, forthcoming kindred spirit to the Americans, a Brit described by one of the girls as “one of us”—becomes a bit of a difficult sell with this level of handsome duke holding down one side. And in adapting the source material to make Theo and Guy childhood friends, The Buccaneers brings the drama into decidedly modern realms. For Wharton, the contrast between the duke’s high status and his hidebound allegiance to the old ways and Guy’s independently earned wealth and forward-thinking habits was plenty, without the added personal wrinkle of a shared youth.

The other English husbands morph for TV as well, bending the plot further toward melodrama. Conchita’s man, Lord Richard Marable (Josh Dylan), goes from being an irredeemably dissipated fool in the book to an honorable lover who will be fine once he breaks free of his family, in the show. Lord James Seadown (Barney Fishwick), a boring, society-obsessed clod, acquires a taste for domestic violence in this adaptation, a choice that highlights the danger of getting married to someone you barely know—only in the world of the adaptation, the conflict is wholly interpersonal rather than cultural.

But Wharton’s interest in changes in British and American society during the late 19^th century isn’t really the TV version’s concern—or, at least, not consistently. In spots, history shows through, but it seems to do so almost by accident. Among the show’s younger characters, very few of them—only the worst of them, in fact, like Seadown—are depicted as not entirely independent and progressive in mindset. In the adaptation, Mabel has become a closeted lesbian, and when she reveals herself to her sister Lizzy, Lizzy gives a touching, supportive speech about love being love, ripped straight from the 21^st century. Characters that are anachronistically accepting of difference are a true hallmark of adapted historical fiction that is trying too hard to be recognizable to modern viewers.

Julian Fellowes’ HBO show The Gilded Age, critics pointed out during its first season, superficially cribs from Wharton without at all seeming to understand the concerns that animated the novelist. Some people might argue that The Buccaneers does the same thing. The novelist loved thinking about people’s relationship to tradition and history, and the character of Nan, in the novel, has all of her free-spiritedness grounded and counterbalanced by her instinctual affinity for Britain’s past. The pretty young things of Apple’s Buccaneers, on the other hand, seem to barely exist in time and space. Most historical signifiers, especially the more awkward ones, like the novel’s scenes in which the girls commission minstrel shows for Christmas at their country houses, have been stripped away. We’re left with a group coming-of-age adventure, something that feels as if it could easily be set, instead, on an undergrad semester abroad, in 2023.

And yet—the romance is compelling, and the wisteria is wisteria. I watched all eight episodes of the series in a white heat, and I am ready for more. Unlike The Gilded Age, and unlike the buccaneers themselves, 2023’s The Buccaneers knows its place. Now if only they’d turn down the music.