Is ‘The Buccaneers’ a ‘Gossip Girl’ Callback?

When AppleTV+’s The Buccaneers first premiered, the series felt like a fun throwback to the era of CW teen soap operas, particularly the anachronistic period drama Reign. The adaptation of Edith Wharton’s unfinished novel acted as a companion to HBO Max’s The Gilded Age, imagining the tangled misadventures of rich American teens hunting for husbands among the landed gentry of England. In its second season premiere, The Buccaneers reintroduced itself with even higher-flung drama and called back to the CW’s crown jewel of messy teen soaps: Gossip Girl.

In the first season finale, Nan Saint George (Kristine Froseth) struck a hard bargain. She was in love with the dreamy but destitute Guy Thwarte (Matthew Broome), who was looking for a way to restore his fallen family. Guy’s best friend, Theo, Duke of Tintagel (Guy Remmers), fell madly in love with Nan and proposed to her. Meanwhile, Nan’s sister Jinny (Imogen Waterhouse) married the abusive and psychotic Lord James Seadown (Barney Fishwick). As Nan sorted out her love triangle and got engaged to Theo, Seadown covered Jinny in bruises. When Theo’s mother, the Dowager Duchess (Amelia Bullmore), discovered a tryst between Nan and Guy, they worked out a deal to save Jinny. Guy took Jinny away from Seadown to parts unknown with her daughter in tow, and in return, Nan married Theo. She would have to pretend at a love she doesn’t feel for the duke so that her sister can be safe.

This was a perfect parfait of lies on its own, but then The Buccaneers kicked it up a notch with a new twist in its second season: the birth mother Nan was told had passed away is actually alive and attending her wedding to Duke Theo. Nan’s mother Patti (Christina Hendricks), confronts this mystery woman, and viewers drink in the glamorous face of the Gossip Girl queen, Leighton Meester. How better to pay homage to the CW classic than to get Blair Waldorf herself to play a bombshell character?

As Nell, Patti’s disgraced and estranged younger sister, Meester is a wellspring of conflicting emotions. Through her tense, tender exchanges with Patti, we learn that Nan is the product of infidelity. Colonel Tracy St. George (Adam James) coerced a young Nell into his bed while Patti was away. Patti blamed Nell much more than she did Tracy, and so Nell was thrown out of their lives. When Nell eventually meets Nan and advises her through her anxieties, Meester’s eyes well with barely contained tears, and her breath catches in her throat. Despite Nell being a very different character from Blair, casting Meester is the most direct reference the series makes to Gossip Girl. Through Nell, The Buccaneers emulates the CW series in another key way. The show ties the adults’ past mistakes and old secrets to the ongoing drama of the teenage main characters. This was a consistent thread throughout Gossip Girl in which the parents’ foibles usually had direct connections to what the teen cast was going through. Like Gossip Girl, The Buccaneers layers big lies upon bigger lies, setting the stage for a chain reaction of drama to erupt for viewers’ pleasure.

Notably, The Buccaneers doesn’t put the controls on autopilot and follow every convention Gossip Girl popularized. The series is much more earnest in its emotional storytelling than the sarcastic, cynical Gossip Girl ever was. Their aims are distinct from one another; The Buccaneers goes for ravishing romance, while Gossip Girl prefers shock value for its own sake. Both series, however, love to skewer the rich and powerful about as much as they celebrate them. Gossip Girl’s ruling class of New York is as shallow, broad, and cartoonish as the English aristocracy in The Buccaneers. The palatial Upper East Side apartment is as aspirational as the castle in Tintagel.

The Buccaneers is much softer-hearted than Gossip Girl, but they share a lot of DNA. One wonders what an homage to a classic YA soap opera is even doing on AppleTV+, a home for disparate, star-stuffed prestige TV. It’s an unexpected treat to find a teen soap like The Buccaneers alongside solidly adult fare like Severance, The Studio, or Murderbot. The Buccaneers calls back to the Gilded Age, but it stands out in a mature-minded slate by invoking the sordid Gossip Girl past.