It would be very tempting to focus all sentiment about A Thousand Blows around the fact that it's the most legitimate replacement for Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight has made so far. So tempting, in fact, that I'm going to. But that's while also acknowledging Knight's excellent work on the likes of See, SAS Rogue Heroes, and Tom Hardy's deliciously good Taboo. There's just something a lot more familiar about Knight's return to the criminal underworld of England, a few decades before Tommy Shelby started making a name for himself.

Set in London, rather than Birmingham, and in the 1880s, rather than 1919 like Peaky Blinders, the genetics of A Thousand Blows make it something like a cousin to the sprawling Shelby saga. It follows Jamaican immigrants Alec Munroe (Francis Lovehall) and Hezekiah Moscow (Malachi Kirby) as they arrive in Victorian London to make their fortune, and are quickly - and not unwillingly - swallowed up by a life of crime and illegal bare-knuckle boxing.

The top line of the cast is rounded out by Erin Doherty (The Crown) as real-life gang leader Mary Carr, and the ferocious Stephen Graham (one of the UK's finest gifts to the modern screen) as veteran boxer Sugar Goodson. Carr is an interesting parallel to Tommy Shelby, striking a stark contradiction with the proper sensibilities of the Victorian Era (and particularly the expectations of women therein), and Graham is the opposite to his Peaky Blinder pacifist. And honestly, the whole thing is a triumphant continuation of Steven Knight's exceptional form.

There's Not A Single Performance That Isn't Excellent

You're Going To Talk About These Performances For A Long Time

There's not really a main character in A Thousand Blows, because focus shifts between Hezekiah Moscow and Mary Carr, with a fair amount of time devoted to Sugar Goodson, too. Hezekiah is the Oliver Twist stand-in, brought to London to find his fortunes, and almost immediately ensnared by criminality. Moscow is excellent: a calmer, less cartoonish figure whose still waters run deep; watching his pragmatic fall into the underworld is compelling stuff.

As the young Princess Anne in the first seasons of The Crown, Erin Doherty was a revelation. She then backed that up with an acclaimed role in Chloe, but it's felt like she's been waiting for the floodgates to open to match opportunities with her obvious ability. That will now assuredly happen, because Mary Carr is as captivating as Tommy Shelby ever was. Just as complex and haunted too. She's arguably more like a cross between Fagin and Nancy from Oliver Twist, with an edge of Bill Sykes' violence.

When Stephen Graham arrived in Peaky Blinders, he did so with uncharacteristic restraint as a man of words and not violence. His performance as Sugar Goodson is the polar opposite, and honestly, is everything I initially wanted from him in the Birmingham-set show. He is absolutely terrifying in the same way as he was in his breakout role as Andrew "Combo" Gascoigne in Shane Meadows' This Is England. In that respect, he's a lot like Arthur Shelby, and crucially, he also balances his hair-trigger potential for violence with something deeper.

That's the case for each of the main characters: Hezekiah's traumatic origin story is told at times through flashback, while both Sugar and Mary wear their childhoods as very obvious scars. For all three, there's a subtle brilliance to how their outward bravado, and aspirations of betterment threaten to be undone by the ghosts of their past. And a lot of the time, you get that solely from physical performance details. Honestly, I can't say enough about how great they are.

Like Peaky Blinders, A Thousand Blows packs British talent in even minor roles. The excellent Ashley Walters turns up, along with Billy Elliott’s dad, Gary Lewis, 9 Songs’ Kieran O’Brien, and stand-up comedian Tom Davis (usually a gentle giant whose size here is way more an expression of violence). All are used sparingly and brilliantly, and this feels like a real showcase of British talent.

Nods must also go to Daniel Mays, who plays a somewhat peripheral figure, but is typically excellent (as he is in everything he appears in), and Jason Tobin, the most reluctant of the story's participants as a Chinese hotel owner who plays the moral heart of the piece. His facial expressions alone make this worth watching.

Go On Then, Let's Compare It To Peaky Blinders A Bit More

A Thousand Blows Fills The Historical British Gangster Vacuum Well

Peaky Blinders wasn't so much a great TV show as it was a cultural reset, particularly in the UK. If you went to any pub or bar for a good 10 years after Tommy Shelby first arrived and you'd see not only his outfits (including razor-free flat caps), but his severe haircut sported with comical frequency. A Thousand Blows doesn't have that, because the Thousand Elephants have a completely different (and less convenient) aesthetic, but it does boast the same sort of perverse romantic dream of a grubbier part of the UK's history.

Like Peaky Blinders, the show is true story-adjacent, with history adapted purely only when it serves the story, and that's absoutely fine by me.

For all of its exceptional storytelling, Peaky Blinders did one thing wrong: broadening the scope beyond the Shelbys’ community. As Tommy’s world grew, we lost some of that intimacy. A Thousand Blows starts more like a Gangs Of New York set-up, distilling the grand scale of London down to what feels like a single square mile. That allows the directors to create a look that feels like a stage set, with Sugar Goodson’s pub at its center. It’s a remarkably clever way to underline exactly that message, and the subtle expression of invasion that Hezekiah and Alec represent to Goodson’s world.

Weirdly, the show is essentially a heist story without the conventional gloss of that genre, with several threads of active and background stories leading to immaculate world-building. It's quite busy, ittedly, but the web of threads tie together very well. If there's one cost to this, it's that some of the more interesting minor characters are a little sidelined.

Final Thoughts On A Thousand Blows

If You Take Nothing Else From This Review, WATCH THIS SHOW

Whether A Thousand Blows manages the same cultural impact as Peaky Blinders did out of the gate is less certain (Hulu shows always seem to have a glass ceiling), but there's no doubt the show deserves - demands, in fact - attention. The characters are as instantly compelling in the way that sprawling HBO dramas manage, the performances are very, very good, and the story hurtles along wonderfully.

I'm torn between what the biggest selling point is: whether it's Erin Doherty's multi-faceted performance, or Stephen Graham's personification of a walking landmine, primed to go off at any time. In the end, I think it's Malachi Kirby's performance as Hezekiah that deserves it. All three are excellent, but Kirby is newer as a character type to the Knight universe, and bolder as a result. And if you care less about performances, and more about story, the show does not deliver.

For all the comparisons in here to Peaky Blinders, A Thousand Blows is excellent for its differences too. Even the similarities - the socio-political commentary, the gangland stories, the colorful characters - are fresh and interesting. And while some lazy detractors might stumble over themselves to say this is Wokey Blinders because of the centralization of both a female gang and the immigrant story, all they'll achieve is missing out on something very special.

A Thousand Blows is about as good a 6-episode run as I've seen in some time. I wish there was more, which, luckily, there is; a second season will follow at some point soon, and it can't come soon enough. Until then, run to watch it.

All six episodes of A Thousand Blows release on Friday, February 21, 2025 on Hulu in the U.S. and Disney+ internationally.