I'm always a little leery of anything that looks like a parody show. I'm not sure I could have definitively put my finger on why, until I watched the pilot of the HBO Max pirate parody series, OUR FLAG MEANS DEATH.
The premise is simple: an upper class guy who knows nothing about being a pirate and seems much more into helping his crew improve their lives runs a pirate ship. The show is very playful with this concept; most of the crew are thoughtful and articulate in a way that pirates just never are. And that's the gag of it, right? Take something familiar and give a new spin on it, and that spin by being so out of sorts with our expectations ends up making it funny.
At the same time, I spent most of the pilot wondering, So what? And this is the problem with a parody show: There are no real stakes. When your characters are all just punchlines, there's really nothing of emotional value to lose.
But then at the very end, the FLAG pilot sneaks up and surprised me. Midway through the captain had this very emotional revelation that he was not a pirate, he was an idiot, and it was played as just another indication of how ridiculous he was. But then after the battle is over a glimpse into his memories explains exactly what that revelation was all about. And it turns out what he's realized is that he had this beautiful family that actually loved him, and he walked away from them.
It's maybe a 5 second flashback, and yet it absolutely transforms our understanding of the character. He has lost something very real and now he must live with that.
From there we watch him go back to his crew and finish reading Pinocchio to them, and suddenly the paternal aspect of his character makes a whole other sense. He does what he does because they are his surrogate family, and also the children he has lost.
So in a sense the whole pilot is a con job. You think it's just a series of gags, but then no, it's the tale of a man who has messed up his life and clings to the family he's found who accept him anyway.
You can't ask for better than that...
