TV

Starz takes on ‘real’ pirates with ‘Black Sails’

Pirates have long played a role in popular culture, from “Treasure Island” to “Peter Pan” to the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise.

But for the new Starz drama “Black Sails,” premiering Saturday at 9 p.m., producers are aiming to skip the swashbuckling stereotypes in favor of showing the grittier side of pirate life — namely killing people for money.

“Once you start to understand the realities of what that means and what that existence must mean, you realize you’ve never seen a story about pirates, you never seen a story about that world,” says co-creator/executive producer Jonathan Steinberg.

“Every pirate story I’ve ever seen essentially takes place in Never Land, [takes place] in a world where adventure was their reason for being there,” he says. “And their reason for being there was to survive, to make money to function in society themselves. That desperately wanted to be a TV show.”

“Sails” is set 20 years prior to Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island” and is free of the peg-legs and talking parrot tropes. It follows Capt. Flint (Toby Stephens) and his men as they fight for the survival of New Providence Island in the Bahamas — a criminal haven with pirates, prostitutes and thieves.

Since this is Starz, the premium cable elements are there — lesbian sex scenes, nudity, bloody violence — which may help distinguish it from NBC’s upcoming drama “Crossbones,” which stars John Malkovich as the notorious pirate Blackbeard. And while the first few episodes set up a familiar plotline of seeking treasure, Steinberg doesn’t want “Sails” to be defined as simply a “pirate show.”

“We try not to use that word when we’re talking about it. It is to define them by the crime that they’ve committed as opposed to by the life they’re trying to eke out for themselves,” he says.

It’s fun, and I think we want to embrace that. We want it to be a great, big honking action movie, but I think at the end of the day . . . they are people who are very relatable and have very human motivations for what they’re doing, both in stealing ships and doing what they’re doing on land.”

Upping the action-movie quotient is the fact that Michael Bay (“Transformers,” “Armageddon”) is a producer, which shows in the drama’s epic production scale: “Sails” shoots on location in Cape Town, South Africa, and its central pirate ship took 300 craftsmen nearly five months to build (filming has already begun on Season Two).

“The governing principle for us is everything should feel real,” Steinberg says of the sets and costumes. “That was not applied to a lot of the pirate movies I’ve seen.”

He’s hoping that attention to realism makes “Sails” a fresh look at a genre that is centuries old.

“You quickly realize you’re not dusting off anything, what’s underneath the thing that’s gotten dusty is actually what’s interesting,” he says. “It’s rare that you get a canvas this big, this familiar that nobody knows anything about.”