Season two of the Steven Knight series will tide you over until the Peaky Blinders movie premieres in March.
Photo: Robert Viglasky/Disney
The bare-knuckle-boxing bouts of Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes movies. The beautiful suits and gorgeously scripted threats of Boardwalk Empire. And, of course, Steven Knight’s Peaky Blinders, whose Shelby family of murderers and miscreants amassed such a cult following over six seasons that the series is getting its own movie in March. Like these forerunners, the pleasures of Knight’s A Thousand Blows, which premiered all six episodes of its second season on Hulu Friday, lies in looking back on that thin sliver of time, about 15 years ago, when anachronistic old-timey crime was in vogue. Adolescence Emmy winners Stephen Graham and Erin Doherty yell at each other in gutter-trash accents while a swaggy Malachi Kirby terrorizes a British officer to avenge his murdered family. There’s a street war between feuding factions! An art heist! A French anarchist with a stash of dynamite! A Thousand Blows is sometimes nonsensical narratively, but its brisk pace makes for a pulpy, enthusiastically engrossing ride.
A Thousand Blows’s first season introduced its three main characters as they became entangled in one another’s lives in East London in 1880. Jamaican immigrant Hezekiah Moscow (Kirby) arrives in London for what he thinks is a job as a lion tamer, but when he learns the zoo wants to hire him as a “Wild Man of Africa,” he starts making a name for himself in underground boxing matches. There, he develops a flirtation with Mary Carr (Doherty), the leader of the Forty Elephants, an all-female crime gang running complicated schemes across the city. Mary is protected by father-figure Sugar Goodson (Graham), the neighborhood’s incredibly short-tempered crime boss and bare-knuckle-boxing champion, who in one moment is feeding and clothing abandoned children and in another is beating their father nearly to death for neglecting them. Sugar’s got some anger issues! He and Hezekiah share that as well as an attraction to Mary, but Mary has made her preference for Hezekiah clear, which obviously just makes Sugar angrier. One of the series’ most creative elements is the variety of scowls Graham deploys while arguing with Hezekiah, Mary, or his younger brother, Treacle (James Nelson-Joyce), a pragmatic family man who represents everything Sugar’s life could have been if he weren’t filled with so much self-loathing.
In the first season, Kirby and Doherty’s sparky chemistry, from his deadpan observations about her self-importance to her cheeky comments about his boxing prowess, gave the series solid emotional grounding, and they bonded over their shared ambition to transcend their status as “other.” He’s a Black immigrant who left an island where his people were subjugated, pillaged, and murdered; she’s a woman born in the wrong neighborhood, to the wrong parents, and frustrated with the social limitations placed on her class. But the first season ended with Mary and Hezekiah on the outs after he learned his best friend was murdered because Mary ran afoul of another gang leader. Meanwhile, Sugar nearly killed Treacle in a rageful tantrum as they fought about the future of their pub, Blue Coat Boy, an act of violence that unmoored Sugar and sent him tumbling into alcoholism.
Admittedly, A Thousand Blows wouldn’t be as entertaining if everyone moped too long, so although Hezekiah, Mary, and Sugar are down on their luck when season two picks up a year later, the series quickly rectifies that. Ousted as the leader of the Forty Elephants, Mary tries to win them back with another big scheme, this time with hypnotist Sophie Lyons (Catherine McCormack), traveling from New York City to join her crew. Hezekiah gets tapped by the queen’s goddaughter, Victoria Davies (Aliyah Odoffin), to train a member of the royal family in boxing, which allows Hezekiah and Victoria to bond over their status as Black people in a heavily white London. And although Sugar is still as much of a brute in the ring as ever, Graham dials back some of his dead-eyed lunacy to make him softer and sadder, a man realizing that his dreams of glory have dissipated. Things buzz along so steadily and so fleet-footedly, you won’t notice the characters whose personalities were entirely rewritten after season one, or all the subplots that drop out of the story as these latest episodes progress — nor, really, will you care. It’s just too much of a good time watching Mary and the Elephants ingratiate themselves into high society, and Hezekiah calling out nobles on their cruelty, and Sugar and Treacle, after a season of backstabbing and undermining, finally trusting one another. A Thousand Blows hits the same combination as before, but all the jabs land.
To be clear, the joys of A Thousand Blows are not particularly deep. It’s not a coherent political document: It only gestures at racial equality and feminist empowerment scene to scene and weakly approaches anarchism as an ideology. (One guy says that an explosion in the East End would be a “victory” for people, but a victory against who? The gangs? The cops? The queen of England? Unclear!) There’s a lot of deus ex machina resolution of tight binds, things that happen off-screen and are waved away. Somehow, though, none of this really detracts from the minute-to-minute joys of a series so distinct in its characterizations, forward-looking in its plotting, and willing to prioritize vivacity and gratification. The guy who you want to get punched in the face? Yeah, he gets punched in the face, and A Thousand Blows knows how to ride the wave of that adrenaline to short-lived, but palpable, euphoria.