Top Boy

Yann Demange's Top Boy launched on Channel 4 in October 2011 across two original four-episode series in 2011 and 2013, was cancelled by Channel 4 after the second series, and was revived by Netflix in 2019 with the personal involvement of Drake, the Canadian rapper, who had become a vocal fan of the show during its hiatus and brought it to Netflix's commissioning team. The Netflix run continued for three additional seasons through 2023, totalling thirty-one episodes across the full property's twelve-year span.

The series was created by Ronan Bennett, the Irish novelist and screenwriter who would later create the BBC's The Day of the Jackal reboot and Sky Atlantic's Hidden Assets. Bennett wrote the entirety of the show himself across all five series. The decade-long run is one of the longest single-author commitments in British scripted television history, comparable in scale only to Jed Mercurio's Line of Duty and Russell T Davies' Doctor Who stewardship.

The cast across the run includes Ashley Walters, Kane Robinson (better known as the rapper Kano), Letitia Wright (in early career, before Black Panther), Joseph Adewunmi, Saffron Hocking and Jasmine Jobson; the production work consistently from real cast members from London's grime music scene rather than from purely conventional acting backgrounds. The series was shot largely on location across Hackney, Tower Hamlets and Newham in East London, much of it in the actual Lockfield Estate in Hackney, the spiritual model for the fictional Summerhouse Estate at the centre of the show. Top Boy won the BAFTA TV Award for Best Drama Series at the 2023 ceremony.