Peaky Blinders

Steven Knight's Peaky Blinders began on BBC Two in September 2013 and ran for six series until 2022, with a feature-length film in 2024. It established Cillian Murphy as a leading man, did the same for Tom Hardy as the Jewish gangster Alfie Solomons, and made the actual Peaky Blinders (a real Birmingham gang from the 1890s, mostly forgotten by 2013) a permanent reference point in British popular culture.

The series is set in post-First-World-War Birmingham, where Tommy Shelby (Murphy), shell-shocked from the trenches and capable of unusual cruelty, leads his family's bookmaking operation as it expands into national-scale organised crime. Each series escalates: from local race-fixing in series one to confrontation with Sam Neill's Inspector Campbell, to legitimate-business rivalry with Hardy's Solomons, to the rise of British fascism in series five. Helen McCrory as Aunt Polly Gray, until her death in 2021, was the show's matriarch and conscience.

Knight's writing operates in registers of high theatricality (the slow-motion entrances over Nick Cave's Red Right Hand) and quieter naturalism (the kitchen-table arguments). The series's commitment to a stylised regional accent, an actual sense of British inter-war class structure, and a sustained moral seriousness about violence elevated it well beyond its initial premise of stylish gangsters.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The most consequential British crime drama since Our Friends in the North, and the rare period series that became a fashion phenomenon without sacrificing its dramatic seriousness. Murphy's Tommy is one of the great television performances of the 2010s.