Black Sails (Seasons 1–4)

Black Sails (2014) is a pirate adventure series you can watch online on iFILM. Four seasons on Starz, shot partly in South Africa, set on the island of New Providence at the dawn of the eighteenth century — twenty years before the events of Stevenson's Treasure Island, when pirates still ran the place.

Toby Stephens plays Captain Flint: brilliant, ruthless, and working on borrowed time. Luke Arnold's John Silver is his unpredictable counterpart — quick-talking, survivalist, not yet the man the novel describes but clearly becoming him. Hannah New plays Eleanor Guthrie, who controls the island's black-market trade and answers to no one. When the British Navy returns to Caribbean waters, Flint decides attack is the only viable defence.

Created by Jonathan Steinberg and Robert Levine, the show was filmed using full-scale ship builds and open-water rigs that were rare for cable television at the time. It fills in the backstories Stevenson left blank — and by the final season, the gap between fiction and the classic novel has almost closed. Stream all four seasons of Black Sails online on iFILM.