First things first: I consider Peaky Blinders to be one of the best TV programs ever aired on Netflix or anywhere else, for that matter. This epic tale of a crime family rising from impoverished back streets to national prominence, with all the unabashed violence and brutality that comes with it, for me belongs in the same class with gangster masterpieces like The Godfather and The Sopranos where the storytelling morphs deadly thugs into living, breathing human beings we can care for.
What follows is some of what I like best about the series now that it has released its sixth and final season. While more specific articles may follow, this one is SPOILER FREE.
THE MAGNETIC POWER OF A SUPERB LEAD
Even with a surrounding stellar cast, the success of any show always falls on the shoulders of the main character. Tommy Shelby (played perfectly by Cillian Murphy) is a crime boss, a man, a ghost, an addict, a murderer, an obsessive, a husband and father. Tommy towers over every move the Shelby family makes, much like Michael Corleone and Tony Soprano do over theirs, and like his famous counterparts he’s secretly wracked by betrayals, regrets, failures and a fear of weakness.
CINEMATIC EXCELLENCE
Stunning cinematography is a hallmark of Peaky Blinders, loaded with the same darkly poetic soul as the show’s main character, Tommy. The directors regularly generate visually spectacular compositions and tableaus that match the dramatic and unapologetically testosterone-driven nature of the tale; if you’re a fan of stagey fogbound alleys lit by sprays of molten metal, sumptuous backdrops and slow-motion group walks akin to Reservoir Dogs, this is the place for you.
GREAT FEMALE CHARACTERS
I love great female characters and Peaky Blinders offers no shortage of complicated women who bring their unique strengths to bear in a harsh world dominated by men. From the damaged matriarch Polly Gray (the late Helen McCrory) to the resilient Ada Shelby (Sophie Rundel) to the tortured survivor Lizzy Stark (Natasha O’Keefe), the Peaky Blinders women are the soldiers behind the curtain who keep the ship afloat when the men screw things up.
NO PLAN SURVIVES CONTACT WITH THE ENEMY
On a show where so much craftiness and forethought are plugged into every operation and heist it’s a devilish delight to watch how many ways the Shelby’s carefully designed plans go wrong. What is truly amazing is how the writers manage to believably bring Tommy back from the brink of his empire collapsing again and again. And it just isn’t Tommy—everybody else gets caught in the twists of their own machinations, including enemy gangs and the police.
THE POWER OF DREAMS, OPIUM, INDUSTRY AND MAGIC
The Peaky Blinders story, like many great stories, is one of a people stuck between two worlds, a conflict exemplified in the character of Tommy Shelby. He is both alive and dead, believing that he should have (and perhaps, in a way, did) die in a tunnel collapse in the trenches of World War I, an event that haunts him. Though his mind is sharp and his body quick, he deadens his emotional pain with alcohol and opium and thus can render himself confused and vulnerable.
The western world was in the heady throes of the maturing industrial revolution in the early 1900s and nowhere was that burgeoning modernism more evident than in the factory town of Birmingham, England. This tremendous social and cultural move from an agrarian society to an urban one was well under way but many people were still caught between the old ways and the new.
The Shelby family were descended from gypsies and despite their wealth some never wanted to (or could) shake off the intense mysticism of their old Gypsy ways. Much in the way Peaky Blinders moves between the hardscrabble grime of Birmingham to the idyllic, wagon-drawn, modernity-eschewing life of the gypsy nomads in the countryside, so Tommy Shelby vacillates between the modern and gypsy sides of his soul.
THE BEST TV SOUNDTRACK EVER
The alternately loud, pulsing, pounding and soft, whispering, lonely tracks chosen by the Peaky Blinders team helped elevated the show to another emotional level. They chose their spots well, making no bones about intrusiveness and selecting music that complemented their sequences in spades.
Starting with the ominous opening track “Red Right Hand” (Nick Cave and the Seeds, with a number of variations), the show liberally employed belting rock like Royal Blood’s “Come on Over” and Black Sabbath’s “The Wizard” in alternation with soft, eerie melodies like Radiohead’s “You and Whose Army” and Mozart’s “Requiem in D Minor.”
If you watch the series all the way through, the song at the end of the last Peaky Blinders episode is the magnificently weird and haunting “All the Tired Horses” by Lisa O’Neill.
If you like this genre you can’t do better than Peaky Blinders.
SERIES RANKING: 9.8 out of 10
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