A casual entertainment news watcher might think that Black Sails, what’s very clearly a move to capture the wonder and awe that is pirates and Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag in an episodic adventure, would blow up in its network’s face. After all, nothing makes a show more unappealing then being ripped from other popular mediums, right?
Well, turns out that’s wrong. Starz the cable network that airs Black Sails says that the show’s début was its biggest ever.
According Starz itself, numbers compiled by Nielsen indicate that 2.6 million people watched the début of their pirate adventure this past weekend. That number includes the amount of people who watched the episode live and watched a repeat of the episode on the day it first aired. Additionally, Starz says that 900,000 viewers have streamed the episode through “on-demand, online platforms and affiliate linear airings.” In short, people are streaming the show a lot online too.
That’s good news for a network that increasingly found itself on the wrong end of the ratings scales with living bombs like Kelsey Grammar’s Boss. We’re not exactly sold on watching hour-long drammas centered around looting, stealing and giant boasts but we’ll give it a chance for Kenway.