These days the new version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s boaty classic unfurls its sails on Mondays on Paramount+, part of a just-expanded, soon-to-be-hegemonic entertainment behemoth – but for subscribers who fire up the relevant app every week, the product they consume here has the right old-school feel. It’s a handsome adventure with a glint of steel.
Who and what Silver is defines any Treasure Island dramatisation, and the qualities of this one come largely from Oyelowo’s reading of the notorious parrot-balancer, and series creator Robert Murphy’s writing of him: their Long John is a thrillingly impossible antagonist, able to emerge strengthened from the foulest predicament.
But he’s a modern pirate too, most obviously for being Jamaican, which adds layers to the story of English treasure-hunters sailing to an island near there to try to snatch a trove of legendary riches; nor is the show slow to see the class element in the mutiny on the Hispaniola, which Silver’s natural leadership qualities inspire.
As well as bringing sex to the show’s salty mix – Bess knows her face, body and unmarried status are her currency, and the agency the show gives her means it’s a plot strand about exploitation that doesn’t itself become exploitative – Bess lends nuance to Jim’s coming of age, which is now a rebellion against parental control as well as just a boy having to quickly learn to survive in a man’s world.
Having the wise, perceptive Long John Silver become a father figure to Jim twists it again, while the fact that Bess’s presence is unexpected means we can’t be sure how her tale will end.
All that’s to come, though, for viewers of an opening episode that deals with the story’s prologue in the Hawkins inn on the west coast of England near Bristol, and which plays like a cross between a Western set in a beleaguered saloon, and a period drama where an unlikely marriage to the gentry is the only way out of poverty for plucky Bess and Jim.
The latter really does feel like old-fashioned TV entertainment, of a kind that’s almost been lost: this Treasure Island makes a strong effort to take us back there.
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