Peaky Blinders Review

Knight's Birmingham gangster saga runs on style with total conviction, and here the style is the substance: foundries lit like hellmouths, slow walks scored to Nick Cave and PJ Harvey, a period drama that flatly refuses to sound like one. The anachronism is the smartest decision in it, because it stops the 1920s settling into heritage television. Cillian Murphy plays Tommy Shelby almost entirely in stillness, a man whose shellshock is legible in the length of his pauses, and Helen McCrory's Polly is the only person who can hold a scene against him without raising her voice.

Tom Hardy's Alfie Solomons arrives in the second series and rewrites what the show is willing to be funny about. What keeps it out of the top rank is a plot engine that repeats on a fixed cycle, a deal and a betrayal and a near-execution and a larger enemy, every single year. The writing is enormously quotable and frequently just as pleased with itself, trading in pronouncements where a scene would do. Nobody comes to this for the architecture, and it turns out not to matter much.