Peaky Blinders (TV series)

• 1. Introduction

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  Peaky Blinders, Steven Knight's British crime drama, left a mark that the Office for National Statistics could measure in baby names. In 2018, the name Arthur entered the top 10 boys' names for the first time since the 1920s. Ada jumped into the girls' top 100 for the first time in a century. The office assumed the cause was two characters, Arthur Shelby Jr. and Ada Thorne. A drama about gangsters had somehow reached into the way families name their children. How did that happen? Who were the real gang behind the fiction, and how faithfully does the series treat the years it borrows? Who built the show, and what happened when its makers announced the ending?

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• 2. Birmingham, 1919

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  Several months after the First World War ended, in 1919, a family of mixed Irish Traveller and Romani origins is already running a gang in Birmingham. That is where the series begins.

  The Shelbys lead the Peaky Blinders, a street gang whose real-life model was an urban youth gang active in the city from the 1880s to the 1920s. The television version is fictional and only loosely based on that history. Its boss is Tommy Shelby, an ambitious and cunning man played by Cillian Murphy.

  Major Chester Campbell arrives with a mission from Winston Churchill. Campbell is a detective chief inspector in the Royal Irish Constabulary, an Ulster Protestant policeman drafted from Belfast and played by Sam Neill. In Belfast he had been sent against Irish Republican Army flying columns, the Communist Party of Great Britain, street gangs and common criminals. His orders now are to put down disorder and uprising in Birmingham. He must also find a stolen stash of weapons and ammunition that was bound for Libya.

  The 3rd of December 1919 is the date the first series builds toward. The gang calls it Black Star Day. On that day the Peaky Blinders plan to seize Billy Kimber's betting pitches at the Worcester Races. Kimber is a local kingpin who leads the Birmingham Boys and runs the races. Charlie Creed-Miles plays him, and he appears only in this first series.

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• 3. Years of Upheaval

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  Derby Day, the 31st of May 1922, brings the second series to its climax at Epsom racecourse. The series had opened in 1921 with the gang spreading its criminal organisation across the South and North while keeping Birmingham as its stronghold.

  By 1924, the third series sends Tommy and the gang abroad, widening their business internationally. Paddy Considine appears as Father John Hughes, a priest involved with an anti-communist organisation. The painter Ruben Oliver is hired by Polly to paint her portrait. The Russian Grand Duchess Tatiana Petrovna also arrives, and Arthur has a new wife named Linda.

  Christmas Eve 1925 brings bad news in series four. The New York Mafia, led by Luca Changretta, is coming to avenge the murder of his father Vicente, whom Tommy killed in the previous series. Adrien Brody plays Changretta. The series closes after the general strike of May 1926. Along the way Tommy uses the communist leader Jessie Eden for information, and by 1927 he has been elected a Member of Parliament.

  Black Tuesday, the 29th of October 1929, opens series five. It runs until the morning of the 7th of December 1929, after a rally led by Oswald Mosley.

  Series six begins on the 5th of December 1933, just as prohibition is repealed in the United States. The Nazi Party has taken power in Germany, and Mosley's British Union of Fascists is gaining members. Tommy must face Mosley, plots from the Irish Mob and the Anti-Treaty IRA. Sam Claflin plays Mosley across series five and six, with Amber Anderson as his second wife, the aristocratic socialite Lady Diana Mitford.

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• 4. The Shelby Ensemble

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  Helen McCrory plays Elizabeth Pollyanna Gray, known as Polly, who was born a Shelby. She is aunt to the Shelby siblings and treasurer of the gang, and she appears in the first five series.

  Paul Anderson plays Arthur, the eldest of the siblings and Tommy's best friend. Sophie Rundle plays Ada, the only sister. Ada's husband Freddie Thorne, played by Iddo Goldberg, is a known communist who fought in the Great War alongside Tommy. Joe Cole plays John, the third-youngest brother, from series 1-4.

  Two women shape Tommy's private life. Annabelle Wallis plays Grace, an Irish Protestant and former undercover agent. She becomes his first wife and the mother of his son Charles. Natasha O'Keeffe plays Lizzie Stark, an ex-prostitute who works as his secretary. She later becomes his second wife and the mother of his daughter Ruby.

  Tom Hardy joins in series two as Alfie Solomons, the leader of a Jewish gang in Camden Town, and he stays through series six. Noah Taylor plays Darby Sabini, who leads an Italian gang, also in Camden Town.

  Later series bring Aidan Gillen as Aberama Gold, an ally of the gang and Polly's lover. Anya Taylor-Joy plays Gina Gray, the American wife of Michael, who is Polly's biological son and is played by Finn Cole.

  Real historical figures are woven in beside the invented ones. Winston Churchill is played by Andy Nyman in series one, Richard McCabe in series two and Neil Maskell in series five and six. Charlie Murphy plays Jessie Eden, a union convenor who becomes Tommy's lover.

  James Frecheville plays Jack Nelson, a south Boston gang leader who is Gina's uncle and Michael's boss in the United States. The character is based on Joseph Kennedy Sr.

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• 5. Behind the Camera

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  Money from Screen Yorkshire, through the Yorkshire Content Fund, kept most of the filming in Yorkshire. Steven Knight wrote the series, with Stephen Russell and Toby Finlay sharing writing credits on the first run.

  The first series was filmed in Birmingham, Bradford, Dudley, Leeds, Liverpool and Port Sunlight. Railway scenes were shot between Keighley and Damems. They used carriages from the Ingrow Museum of Rail Travel, owned by the Vintage Carriages Trust, along with carriages owned by the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Trust. Many scenes were also filmed at the Black Country Living Museum.

  Sam Neill was born in Ulster and raised in New Zealand, and he had lost his Northern Irish accent. The Northern Irish actors James Nesbitt and Liam Neeson helped him recover it for the role of Campbell. In the end he toned it down, because the series was being marketed in the United States.

  No linguists were hired to advise the production. As a result, the Romani Gypsies in the earlier series often speak broken Romanian rather than Romani.

  On the 11th of January 2014, auditions were held in Digbeth, the Birmingham area near where parts of the series are set. They called for white and mixed race teenage male extras, and lengthy queues formed.

  The official Peaky Blinders Twitter account announced on the 5th of October 2015 that filming had begun on series three. Shooting finished on the 22nd of January 2016, after 78 days. Filming for series four started in March 2017.

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• 6. Netflix and the Final Series

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  The 12th of September 2013 is the date Peaky Blinders premiered, on BBC Two. A second series was commissioned shortly after the first aired, and it ran in October and November 2014.

  On the 24th of September 2014, it was announced that Netflix had acquired exclusive United States rights from the Weinstein Company and Endemol. All of series one became available to stream on the 30th of September 2014. Series two followed in November 2014, and series three arrived on the 31st of May 2016. Licensing restrictions mean most of the original soundtrack is missing from the Netflix version.

  The BBC renewed the show for series four and five while series three was still being broadcast, with six episodes in each. Series four premiered on BBC Two on the 15th of November 2017. The Weinstein Company, formerly involved in the American distribution, was left out of the credits along with its logo.

  Series five had been commissioned in mid-2016. On the 22nd of August 2018, it was confirmed that this series and the next would air on BBC One. Series five premiered to a select audience at Birmingham Town Hall on the 18th of July 2019 and began airing on the 25th of August 2019.

  On the 5th of May 2018, Knight told the Birmingham Press Club, "we are definitely doing series six". Production was due to start in March 2020 but was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic. That year, rumours linked the comedian Rowan Atkinson to the role of Adolf Hitler in series six. The producers denied it, calling the news "completely false".

  On the 18th of January 2021, it was announced that series six, which had just begun filming, would be the last television series. Knight said that "the story will continue in another form". Helen McCrory died in April 2021, and her character was written out of the series, which premiered on the 27th of February 2022.

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• 7. Praise and Disputes

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  David Renshaw of The Guardian called Peaky Blinders a "riveting, fast-paced tale of post-first world war Birmingham gangsters" and praised Murphy as the "ever-so-cool Tommy Shelby". Sarah Crompton of The Telegraph gave the series four stars out of five. Den of Geek called it "the most intelligent, stylish and engrossing BBC drama in ages". Metacritic gives the show a weighted average of 86 out of 100, based on seven reviews. The last series holds a 93% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, drawn from 14 reviews.

  Several critics compared the show favourably to the American series Boardwalk Empire. Knight said in an early interview that he had never watched it, nor The Wire. He explained that he did not want to look at other people's work because it inevitably affects what you do.

  On the 2nd of March 2016, Knight told the Crime Scene Quarterly about some admirers. He named the director Michael Mann, the author Dennis Lehane, Snoop Dogg and the late David Bowie. Bowie's music was later confirmed for series three, and Leonard Cohen wrote a new song for it.

  Historians have been divided over one choice. The show brings characters and events from other decades into a story set in the 1920s. Some say this undermines its accuracy. Others say it still portrays working-class life of the period in a truthful and resonant way.

  Graham Stevenson, a trade union leader, writer on British communism and biographer of the real Jessie Eden, was a harsh critic. He had known Eden when she was in her seventies. He doubted that her private life was as dramatic as her screen counterpart's, and he wrote that "The social values of the programme are ahistorical." He also objected to the clothing, to Churchill being shown as Home Secretary in 1919, and to Eden appearing as a mass leader in the 1926 General Strike. He eventually stopped watching. He was disappointed that the historical adviser was an expert in Tudor history rather than in trade unionism or communism.

  At a round table, the poet Dave Puller and the cultural historian Paul Long joined Stevenson to discuss how the show depicts the working class. Long rated it positively, praising its interesting working-class protagonists. Puller was disappointed that the show chose Eden's fictional romance with Tommy over her real achievements as a communist and trade unionist.

  A separate criticism concerns the Romani background of the Shelbys. The filmmakers placed little emphasis on a clearly defined Romani identity and wrote what the source calls "gypsy characters" to serve narrative functions. This puts the protagonists at the margins of society and lets the series show the lower strata of interwar Britain, which popular culture often neglects. The characters are active agents rather than only victims. Their actions, however, are often shown as violent and deceitful, reinforcing antigypsyist stereotypes.

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• 8. Beyond the Screen

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  In 2025, four Afghan men were ordered to report to the Taliban government's department of vice and virtue for dressing in costumes inspired by the series. Far away, on the 5th of December 2024, soldiers of the National Guard of Ukraine from a unit named Peaky Blinders received gifts from the show's creators. The series has been called a cult classic.

  In August 2020, FuturLab released a video game called Peaky Blinders: Mastermind for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch and PC through Steam. Maze Theory developed a virtual reality game, Peaky Blinders: The King's Ransom, released for Meta Quest 2 and PICO 4 on the 9th of March 2023.

  In September 2022, Rambert Dance presented Peaky Blinders: The Redemption of Thomas Shelby. Benoit Swan Pouffer directed and choreographed it, and Knight wrote it. It premiered at the Birmingham Hippodrome, toured the UK and was filmed for the BBC.

  Knight explained that after the year-long production pause in 2020, the team chose a feature-length film in place of a seventh series. At the 2022 National Television Awards, where the show won the Returning Drama award, he said the film would start production in mid-spring 2023. That plan was later delayed. In June 2024, Netflix confirmed the film, with Murphy returning as Tommy Shelby. Production began in September 2024 under the title The Immortal Man. The film is set a few years after the series finale and reached cinemas on the 6th of March 2026, then Netflix two weeks later, on the 20th of March 2026.

  In October 2025, a sequel series was announced for BBC One and Netflix, produced by Kudos and Garrison Drama, with Murphy as an executive producer. Principal photography began in March 2026, with Jamie Bell, Charlie Heaton, Jessica Brown Findlay, Lashana Lynch and Lucy Karczewski joining the main cast.

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