The Premise
Steven Knight's BBC crime saga, six seasons of it, plus the 2026 Netflix film The Immortal Man. Post-WWI Birmingham, a city of soot and canal fog, where the Shelby family runs bookmaking, protection, and whatever else the ledger requires. Cillian Murphy plays Tommy Shelby, a shell-shocked cavalryman with a razor stitched into his cap and ambitions that stretch well past the pub. Early on, Sam Neill's Belfast copper arrives to clean up the town, and the Shelbys, led by Tommy, brother Arthur (Paul Anderson), and aunt Polly (the late Helen McCrory, extraordinary), have to decide whether to shrink or expand. They expand. The show pulls in Tom Hardy, Adrien Brody, Anya Taylor-Joy, Sam Claflin, and Stephen Graham as it goes. The film picks up years later with Tommy dragged back into a family mess tangled up in a Nazi plot.
The Case For
Murphy is doing career-best work here, the kind of stillness that makes you lean forward. He acts with his jaw. McCrory is the show's soul and possibly its best performer, and losing her mid-run is a wound the series feels. The direction, especially Otto Bathurst's pilot and Colm McCarthy's episodes, treats Birmingham like a Western frontier, all long coats and slow walks toward violence. Knight writes dialogue that people actually want to quote, which is rare. The needle drops (Nick Cave, PJ Harvey, White Stripes) shouldn't work in a 1920s period piece and absolutely do. And the production design, the tailoring, the flat caps, the smoke, none of it looks like a costume drama trying to be cool. It just is.
The Case Against
It gets repetitive. Tommy plans something impossible, it nearly collapses, he pulls it out through sheer force of cheekbone. Rinse. Seasons five and six sag under the weight of their own mythology and start believing the memes about themselves. Some plotting is thin, some accents wander, and the show occasionally mistakes slow motion for meaning. If you're allergic to antihero worship or brooding-man television, this is that genre's cathedral.
Who It's For, Who'll Bounce
For you if you loved Boardwalk Empire, The Sopranos, or the grubbier corners of Deadwood, and you want the same shape but faster and with better music. Bounce risk: anyone who wants tight procedural plotting, anyone who finds the "quiet man does violence" archetype exhausting by now, or anyone who needs a female lead in the driver's seat (Polly aside, the women mostly orbit Tommy). Also a hard bounce for people who can't parse Brummie accents without subtitles on.
The Ruling
WORTH IT because the craft holds even when the plotting doesn't. Murphy and McCrory are giving you performances you won't get from most prestige TV, the direction has a distinct visual grammar, and Knight is writing to entertain, not to instruct. There's no sermon here. The show has opinions about class, war trauma, empire, and Irish politics, and it delivers them through character and consequence instead of monologue. Tommy's damage is dramatized, not diagnosed. That's the difference between a show with themes and a show with a lesson plan. It's not top-tier prestige, it repeats itself, and the film is a fine capstone rather than a great one. But six seasons of this, on a rainy Sunday, with the fog rolling in? Yeah. Worth it.
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