The new series from the Peaky Blinders creator about the birth of two-tone music is full of dramatic tension. But this slow, frustrating show fails to actually do anything with it
I have been doing two things that are objectively bad for my mental health lately, and they are: looking at TikTok, and watching The Gentlemen on Netflix. They go together, in a way: The Gentlemen on Netflix isn’t very good (“Alright, Eddie? Kaya Scodelario here. Just going to exposition dump on you without really moving my face or neck”) so you can half-watch that on the TV while half-watching TikTok on your phone, which is very 2024. What my TikTok algorithm gives me is intimate, and classified, but broadly it’s this: American chefs in black nitrile gloves slapping tomahawk steaks before grilling them, Scottish video podcasts where emotionless young men with beards discuss gym supplements, and clips from Peaky Blinders where Cillian Murphy smokes a cigarette and doesn’t say much. That’s what your billion-dollar app has figured out about me. Make of that what you will.
Peaky Blinders is somehow incredible on TikTok, and there may be something in that that explains the extraordinary, electric success of it the first time round. So many scenes are huge and earnest and capital-D Dramatic in a way that you wouldn’t predict would appeal to a wide audience and boost flat-cap sales a million percent but it did, and also, crucially, these Dramatic Scenes somehow work when shorn of all context, clipped into a 9:16 ratio and uploaded to a phone. I’ve seen Tommy Shelby stoically flirt with barmaids, hand out cash to poor widows, order murders and (I’m pretty sure?) infiltrate the highest office of the British government, all without ever watching more than an episode-and-a-half of the show proper. There always seems, in the flashes of Peaky Blinders I have seen, to be someone Making A Move, though in what direction and to what end they are Making it, I don’t ever know.
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