Pirate drama Black Sails is officially Starz’s flagship series after the pay cable network picked up a 10-episode fourth season of the show created by Jonathan E. Steinberg and Robert Levine and executive produced by Michael Bay. The announcement comes as Black Sails wrapped production on Season 3 and was made by Starz CEO Chris Albrecht at the top of the network’s TCA presentation today.

This marks another early renewal for the adventure drama, whose third season is not slated to premiere until early 2016, as it needs long production lead times. The pickups of Season 2, 3 and now 4 all have come months before the previous installment had debuted. Black Sails also is the first Starz original series to go beyond 3 seasons, a high water mark previously set by Spartacus: Blood and Sand (which also did a prequel miniseries) and Da Vinci’s Demons.

Primetime-Panic Your Complete Guide to Pilots and Straight-to-Series orders See All

Black Sails follows the most feared pirate of the day, Captain Flint (Toby Stephens), and takes place twenty years prior to Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic “Treasure Island.” The upcoming third season is adding Rome alum Ray Stevenson as the famed pirate Blackbeard.

The first two seasons of Black Sails averaged 4.5 million multi-platform viewers per episode, per Starz estimates, and the series is distributed in over 175 countries and territories worldwide. It won won two Emmy Awards in 2014, for special and visual effects and sound editing.

Bay executive produces Black Sails with his Platinum Dunes partners Brad Fuller and Andrew Form, as well as Chris Symes and Dan Shotz.