The following will completely spoil the series for you if you haven’t watched it yet.

  • A teenager shoots a firearm he has of course no legal way of owning, the FBI knows about it, yet takes no steps to confiscate the weapon
  • A teenager sets a giant projection screen on fire at an outdoors cinema event. No sanctions follow. The incident is never mentioned again
  • An 80 plus year old BLIND woman lives alone in a gigantic house and moves about as though she isn’t blind
  • A teenage girl manages to cling to a capsized boat AND a large chunk of gold all through the night. You wonder how Jack could possibly have died in Titanic
  • Somehow mobile phones are largely absent from a setting that otherwise looks contemporary. Perhaps the storm took down the masts and no cell phone communication is possible. It’s hard to imagine this show having the same adventurous vibe with mobile phones making everything a hell of a lot easier, but it’s still odd that they aren’t there unless one accepts that they are all down for quite a long time
  • Pope gets into a physical fight with his father who is always nice to him. The whole thing makes no sense.
  • Pope runs out of his interview to be accepted for college. Only the most important event in his young life and one that he has been looking forward to for God knows how long. Ok, teenagers do erratic, impulsive stuff
  • John B burns the last picture he has of his beloved dad… A little odd, though again, teenagers do weird stuff
  • Crimes happen all over the place in full daylight, yet nobody seems to see anything
  • Except for the sheriff who gets shot all the police officers are the most incompetent set of individuals you will ever see in a fictional story
  • When John B finds out that a slave on board the Royal Merchant survived and apparently left a note to his son as to the whereabouts of the gold nobody even raises the question whether that son didn’t just dig up the gold and made off with it. I mean, why is the gold still there? Did the former slave’s son ignore his father’s instruction or was he somehow prevented from doing so? Anyway, nobody ever thinks that the gold may very well be gone already
  • How did the sole survivor – a slave – manage to get the gold out of the ship wreck? The wreck is hard to reach even with modern means. Did the wreck move? Still, how did a slave get all the gold out without any of the local whites noticing?
  • Why did the slave not change his identity?
  • The dude looking for the gold actually lives at the plantation the slave bought with the hold and stores his most precious belongings behind a portrait of the guy. The slave’s story seems to be well known. Why does nobody else figure out that the slave could buy up so much land because he had access to the gold of the Royal Merchant?
  • When John Senior gets into an argument about dividing the gold between him and his sponsor the little argument immediately turns violent. The two could have bargained, but both act like little children with zero room for compromise.
  • The Pogues hate the Kooks, yet their biggest ambition is to go ‘full kook’.
  • Mothers are strangely missing in actions throughout the entire first season. How can so many main characters have lost their mothers or have mothers who completely fade into the background? Do the creators have some weird daddy issues?
  • When John B is stuck in the laundry room it takes him an unusually large amount of time to figure out he could just escape via the ventilation vent…
  • A guy sets fire to an old church, yet there are no consequences. Apart from John B anyone on this show can commit crimes without any consequences
  • The electricity returns at the worst possible time for the protagonists right before a new storm hits the area.
  • The protagonists floating around at sea are immediately spotted by a boat that is quite far off. The crew doesn’t contact the authorities after picking them up. They are somehow in excellent health after surviving a night in the cold water during a storm.
  • They never run out of movie.
  • They don’t need to eat.

And so on and on.

Hey, I did enjoy watching this. Not because the characters are so richly developed (cliches all around) or because the story is so well plotted, but because the setting is quite nice, no matter how simplistic and contrived everything is the show never loses momentum. And who wouldn’t want to run around all over town with great and good looking friends with no parental control, any real duties and in search for gold?

It’s all quite silly, yet somehow entertaining.

It’s as nourishing as a chocolate cake, just as bad for you and just as hard to resist.