“I still cry when I see it, or even if I just hear the song on the radio.”
The first three episodes of new Apple TV+ period drama series The Buccaneers are available to stream now, and viewers will almost certainly be struck early on by how contemporary the show feels.
This is on no small part thanks to the inclusion of modern music throughout, with the works of female pop artists being utilised to tell the story of Nan and her friends, five young American women who come to England searching for suitable matches.
One particularly notable use of modern music comes in the first episode, when Taylor Swift’s Nothing New plays over the scene of a debutante ball.
The show’s creator Katherine Jakeways, and executive producer Beth Willis, both spoke exclusively with RadioTimes.com about this moment, and the show’s use of music as a whole.
Jakeways said: “It was so thrilling, every time we tried a different track, or it was suggested to us a different track or a different artist over a particular scene or moment.
“It didn’t happen every single time, but the ones that we’ve ended up using, and particularly the Taylor Swift one over that debutante ball, the minute we saw it we were like, ‘Oh my God, it suddenly works’. Not that it was wasn’t working anyway, but it just made it feel so relevant and familiar and heart-breaking.”
“We both burst into tears when we saw that Taylor Swift at the debutante ball. In fact, I think I still cry when I see it, or even if I just hear the song on the radio. It’s such an easy way and hopefully a relatively new way of going ‘look, they are just like us and they are feeling this emotion’.”
Meanwhile, Willis added: “Even though they’re wearing period costumes and they’re sitting in an English country pile, we wanted these girls to feel like ourselves and our friends, and clearly, having contemporary music is really going to reach out a hand through history and say, ‘we are one in the same. We’re all women, we all feel the same way’.
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“So really our rule of thumb was just finding music that moved us. And we were incredibly lucky that as well as licensing commercial tracks, like Taylor Swift in the first episode and she makes another appearance later on down the line, we also had bespoke tracks that were written especially for the show. They’re all women artists and they all have a feminist spirit, I think.”
The series is based on Edith Wharton’s unfinished novel of the same name, and stars Kristine Frøseth, Alisha Boe, Josie Totah, Aubri Ibrag, Imogen Waterhouse and Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks.
The Buccaneers will make its global debut on Apple TV+ with the first three episodes on Wednesday 8th November, followed by new episodes weekly. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide to see what’s on tonight.
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