8 Shows Like The Buccaneers to Watch if You Like The Buccaneers

It's official: The Buccaneers is returning for a second season. Apple TV+'s hit series can effectively fill the frothy costume drama void that the second season of HBO's The Gilded Age left in its wake. Still, there's something a bit different about The Buccaneers. It could be its premise, which splices the heady yearning of a Jane Austen novel with the hedonistic chaos of a CW teen drama. Its hyper-modern needle drops from the likes of Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, and Phoebe Bridgers plant this 19th century culture clash firmly in the mania of modern girlhood. And its cast brings a raucous joie de vivre to the five New York socialites whisked off to London for debutante season. 

Sure, it's not the most subtle period romance you'll ever see — like so many of its ilk, it resorts to modern condemnations on the marriage market and heavy-handed declarations of love in exchange for restraint — but creator Katherine Jakeways, adapting Edith Wharton's unfinished novel, is not all that concerned with subtlety. What results is a fun romp across the pond and back, packed with enough juicy drama (romantic and otherwise) to keep you glued to your screen. At just eight episodes, The Buccaneers' odyssey is practically over before it begins, which might leave you with yet another void to fill while you wait for Season 2. Fortunately, there's no shortage of steamy, soapy material to choose from.

Watch The Buccaneers Apple TV+

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The Gilded Age

It seems almost redundant to compare The Buccaneers to The Gilded Age, as it's the one series — apart from Bridgerton — that The Buccaneers has endured constant comparison to. That correlation isn't for nothing: Both shows are glossy, gaudy portrayals of New York society during the Age of Innocence. But the "North American scum" of the The Buccaneers hopscotch back and forth across the pond to invoke the basic themes of a Jane Austen novel, while The Gilded Age roots its conflict squarely in uptown New York, to paint a much more thorough portrait of the city. The HBO drama is just as focused on culture clash as The Buccaneers is, though its cold war is one waged between old and new money. It's only slightly more grown up than The Buccaneers, and with much tamer stakes by comparison — but as a complement to the teenage temperaments and windswept drama of that series, there's no better cooldown than The Gilded Age.

Dickinson

It doesn't get more delightfully anachronistic than Dickinson. In many ways, the Apple TV+ show is a spiritual sister to The Buccaneers, an older, edgier sister that pairs Mitski and Billie Eilish with endlessly depressing poetry. Hailee Steinfeld's take on the famous 19th century poet is touted as "the original sad girl," a title that Dickinson eagerly skewered across its three crackling seasons. The Emily of the series is drawn to the dark side of Romanticism, sure — and her affinity for Death (embodied by Wiz Khalifa, of all people) was certainly something — but series creator Alena Smith wants us to see her affinity for life, too, and exactly how she might have lived it. 

Dickinson is speculative in the best of ways, more interested in contextualizing the inner world of an unconventional young woman than in accurately depicting the times she lived in. Its soundtrack is just one of the many ways we dive into Emily's mind: deeply weird hallucinations, frisky rendezvous with her sister-in-law and best friend Sue (Ella Hunt), and conversations with Death all paint a portrait of a woman who defied characterization. It's a shame the series is gone, but its legacy lives on — in series like The Buccaneers, and in our own fond memories.

Sense & Sensibility

On paper, Sense & Sensibility would be the true inverse of The Buccaneers. A story of destitute sisters searching for an advantageous marriage doesn't leave much room for the proto-feminist adventures that we've come to expect from modern period dramedies. But that's what makes the BBC's 2008 adaptation of Jane Austen's novel such an anomaly. The once-chaste tale opens with a seduction, of all things, setting the tone for a much more sensual take on this story. It doesn't boast quite as many heaving bosoms or ripped bodices as The Buccaneers, but in terms of dashing English suitors, Sense & Sensibility does have the series beat. (No shade to the men of The Buccaneers, but you can't tell me they'd hold a candle to Dan Stevens or David Morrissey in a good old fashioned yearn-off.)

Tom Jones

It's safe to say that any series on PBS Masterpiece is likely to satisfy your post-Buccaneers itch. From Sandition to Howard's End, there's no shortage of romantic costume dramas to enjoy. A recent addition to their catalog is the criminally underseen Tom Jones, a four-part TV drama that's a bit more realistic about Austenian love affairs. Based on the 18th century novel by Henry Fielding, Tom Jones follows the exploits of its titular "boy from nowhere" (Solly McLeod), a foundling searching for love and a place in the world, but it's chiefly narrated by Sophie Wilde's Sophia Western, Tom's neighbor and latest object of affection. When Sophia is engaged to Tom's stuffy cad of a cousin, and Tom runs afoul of his patron's good graces, the star-crossed pair head to London, and each gets wrapped up in the whims of one Lady Bellaston (a devious Hannah Waddingham). As Tom Jones was a limited series, there's no stress about an unresolved cliffhanger. That said, it cultivates enough will-they-won't-they drama in just four episodes to satisfy even the most ravenous romance lovers.

Pan Am

Pan Am is not a 1:1 substitute for The Buccaneers, even if both are technically period pieces. This series follows the lives and loves of a group of Pan Am stewardesses at the dawn of the "Jet Age." But hear me out! So many elements of the former seemed to pave the way for the latter. Before eventually giving way to a deluge of civil rights movements, the '60s were an era of societal suffocations. For the women of Pan Am, becoming a stewardess is the only way to lead the husband-less, promiscuous lives they dream of. And boy, do they. 

Margot Robbie leads a rosy-cheeked ensemble as Laura, another reluctant main character that frequently finds herself at the crux of all the juiciest drama. She's every bit a prototype for The Buccaneers' Nan — she's even got an older sister (Kelli Garner) whom she's constantly overshadowing! Even though her sister is secretly dabbling in espionage! The rest of the girls are equally unconventional: Christina Ricci's Maggie dabbles in Marxism, while their French pal Collette (Karine Vanasse) is fooling around with a married man. It's great, soapy stuff, and though it didn't make it past its inaugural season, it still serves as a fitting palate cleanser for the slightly stuffier society at the heart of The Buccaneers.

Land Girls

Land Girls is another one of Masterpiece's many hidden gems, focusing on a group of enterprising young women fighting to survive in WWII-era Britain. While they can't exactly join up (nor would many of them want to), they can still do their part in the Women's Land Army, a division that helped cultivate crops for troops during the war. Yes, that was a real job during the war: City girls came from all over to live in country manors-turned-hostels, fulfill their cottagecore dreams, and flirt with any man in sight. It wasn't as glamorous as it sounds, of course, and Land Girls doesn't shy away from the economic hardship and pervasive prejudice among the ranks at the time. The series' themes, while progressive, can be parsed out with a heavy hand. But watching an unlikely sisterhood develop in the face of oblivion is still a rare treat. 

Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story

Let's get one thing straight: The Buccaneers is not Bridgerton. Netflix's runaway hit is much more about love (more accurately, lust) than it is about friendship. The two shows might share an appetite for modern musical motifs and self-indulgent statements on female autonomy, but The Buccaneers is a lot more focused on the platonic friendships at its core, making Bridgerton spin-off Queen Charlotte a much more fitting companion. 

The limited series is a prequel following the ascension of Bridgerton's favorite sovereign. It focuses chiefly on Charlotte's (India Ria Amarteifio) strained marriage with King George III (Corey Mylchreest) and her struggles to adapt to suffocating British society — a plight that echoes Conchita's arc in The Buccaneers — but it makes a wise choice to chart the rise of one of Bridgerton's best friendships, too: the one between Charlotte and her first lady-in-waiting, Lady Agatha Danbury (Arsema Thomas). 

Queen Charlotte finds a perfect foil in these two Black women carving out a place of their own. The ups and downs of their life at court form a subplot that lightens the series' heavy take on mental health and retroactively fills in the blanks of Bridgerton's hand-waved approach to 18th century prejudice. If Conchita is your favorite Buccaneer, consider Queen Charlotte an essential supplement.

Good Girls Revolt

There's something ironically infuriating about watching a female-centric period drama and realizing just how little things have changed in the intervening years. Boys will, apparently, be boys, whether they live in 19th century England or New York in the late 1960s. The patriarchy is a near-perpetual adversary, so shows like Good Girls Revolt will always possess some sting of relevance. The 2015 series unfortunately failed to emerge from the shadow of Mad Men when it first aired — try finding a review that doesn't draw a comparison between the two — but time has been kinder to the feminist workplace drama. 

Based on the book by Lynn Povich, the first female editor of Newsweek, Good Girls Revolt follows a group of female "researchers" (not reporters, despite an impossible workload) who band together in search of equality in their shared workplace. It trades the dubious conventions of marriage in The Buccaneers for the slightly more modern plight of the working woman, all while diving deep into the analog process of journalism. At times, it seems to yearn for an age when feminism was a bit more cut-and-dry (or, at least, when women thought it was), but it's the central performances from Anna Camp, Joy Bryant, Genevieve Angelson, and Erin Darke that make this so much more than a mixed bag of "girl power!" platitudes.