Black Sails renewed for Season 4

Fans of the Starz pirate drama can rejoice knowing they have two seasons to look forward to.

At the Starz presentation at the Television Critics Association last week, CEO Chris Albrecht announced that the network’s pirate series, Black Sails, has been picked up for a fourth season, Deadline.com reports.

Production for the third season of the adventure series has recently concluded and it is slated to premiere in 2016. This early renewal is not unusual as the pickups for Seasons 2, 3, and now 4, all came months before the previous installment had even aired. With this development, Black Sails becomes the first Starz original series to go beyond 3 seasons, a standard set by Spartacus: Blood and Sand and Da Vinci’s Demons.

Black Sails is a prequel series to Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic Treasure Island, set twenty years before the events in the novel. The show follows the adventures of Captain Flint (Toby Stephens), the most feared pirate of his time. It also features several characters who will play more prominent roles in the book such as Long John Silver (Luke Arnold) and Billy Bones (Billy Bones). The upcoming third season will be featuring another legendary pirate, Blackbeard, played by Rome‘s Ray Stevenson.

Black Sails season 3 is set to air early 2016.