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With Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ title track “Red Right Hand” setting in, Peaky Blinders’ very first episode introduces Thomas Shelby on horseback, overlooking a Molochian urban environment of smoking chimneys, bursting flames and fires, clanking metal, ant-like workers covered in sweat and dirt, disabled veteran beggars, prostitution, and gambling (00:02-3). A caption reveals: this is Birmingham in 1919, at that time “the biggest industrial city in the world” (Stubbs). Its setting and depiction of industrial working conditions locate Peaky Blinders within a primarily literary tradition of investigating the Condition of England, inviting comparison with industrial novels such as Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life (1848) or Charles Dickens’ Hard Times (1854), both, notably, not set in the perennial centre of attention London,1 but in the industrial North of England. Peaky Blinders’ localism, devoted to a city that “has always been considered deeply unfashionable when it comes to settings for TV drama” (Stubbs) and has hence been “almost invisible” on television screens, as writer Steven Knight put it (qtd. in ibid.), has earned the series a loyal fan-base in Birmingham and the Midlands, “with [first series] audiences in this region almost trebling the national average” (Nagra). The show is predominantly set in Small Heath, a working class district controlled by the Peaky Blinders gang. Their criminal activities, enforced, if need be, by means of facial mutilations inflicted by razor blades sewn into their trademark peaked caps, mostly serve to facilitate the Shelbys’ business undertakings, which soon expand from the family’s race betting shop and bookmaker protection services. Series one witnesses the foundation of Shelby Brothers Ltd., later the Shelby Company Ltd., which comprises a growing division of legitimate dealings, such as a (dubiously acquired)2 legal betting licence and thereby legal racetrack pitch (S1/E4, 00:28). Peaky Blinders thus revises history with a distinctive focus on that which has long been under-represented on British television: the working class milieu, Birmingham, and the gangster.

While the show shares some concerns with the Condition of England genre, in particular its attempt to come to terms with the nature of community in 1920s’ as much as today’s Britain, Peaky Blinders conspicuously lacks the social realism that is normally a hallmark of the genre. Worldwide, the show has been met with critical acclaim (see Long 166), and after it won two BAFTA Television Craft awards in 2014, it was nominated for a BAFTA award as ‘Best Drama Series’ in 2015 (see IMDb), but more remarkable is the show’s “pop culture impact […] à la shows like ‘Mad Men’” (Egner). Similar to Mad Men (2007-2015), Peaky Blinders owes this cult status to the aesthetic appeal of its mise-en-scène, as evidenced by the categories for which it was awarded a BAFTA Television Craft award: ‘Director – Fiction’ and ‘Photography and Lighting’ (see IMDb). The series’ iconic opening sequence, discussed above, establishes the stylistic tone of the show accordingly. Although displaying hard physical labour, dirt and poverty, the images evince a cinematic devotion to aesthetics that manifests itself in an eye for composition and elaborate camera work. The ashes that pollute Birmingham’s streets fall white and soft like snow, and the noises of the city blend with the extradiegetic title track which further frames the scene. “Red Right Hand” is only the most notorious track on Peaky Blinders’ generally distinctive score characterised by an exceptional stylistic consistency and fusion with the diegetic world of Peaky Blinders (see Shine 53-4). Peaky Blinders’ rather frequent, close-up depictions of violence are similarly aestheticised, often dubbed by heavily stylised music and white noise and screened in slow-motion.3 It is in this vein that Peaky Blinders has been accredited with a seal of quality (see Long 166-7) and classified as another instance of this current ‘golden age’ of television (see Shine 48). As so many other contemporary television series, it thus follows in the footsteps of Twin Peaks (1990-1991 and 2017) and The Sopranos (1999-2007), shows usually quoted as having initiated the “com[ing] of age” of television (Shuster 1-2). Martin Shuster has usefully classified these series as the distinctively novel genre or mode (see 170) of ‘new television’ (see 5-6), which comprises a wide range of television styles and genres that exemplify this qualitative turn and, moreover, “exhibit a contemporary world4 as entirely emptied of normative authority” (6).

That Shuster explicitly denominates Peaky Blinders as ‘new television’ (see 6), whilst otherwise focusing on US-American television, is no surprise given that the genre Peaky Blinders operates in is a classically American one. The gangster is an essentially American creation, argues Robert Warshow in his seminal 1948 essay on Hollywood gangster films, “The Gangster as Tragic Hero”. Steven Knight, too, has observed how “[u]nlike the US, where that thing is mythologized and becomes part of the culture, in England, it gets buried” (qtd. in Landau 3). “[T]he gangster speaks for us, expressing that part of the American psyche which rejects the qualities and demands of modern life, which rejects ‘Americanism’ itself”, Warshow contends (130). As such, the gangster might not so much be an American phenomenon as rather a response to a typically US-American modern capitalism. Warshow further argues that “[t]he gangster is a man of the city” that is at the same time the reality of his physical surroundings and a metaphor, “not the real city, but that dangerous and sad city of the imagination which is so much more important, which is the modern world” (131, my emphasis). The gangster movie is usually set in a working-class environment, negotiating the dashed hopes and dreams caused by a (US-American) promise of the individual success of those marginalised by society on the grounds of class and ethnicity (see Munby 3-5). The same applies to Peaky Blinders, whose ganglands are populated by ‘Gypsies’, Italians, and Jews. Ambitious Thomas similarly has to “f[i]nd out […] that no amount of money allows [him] to pass through the steel sheets that separate class from class” (S4/E5, 00:49). Knight thus explains the absence of the gangster on British screens, his being a “working-class history”. He reasons: “[T]he idea that there was a functioning, working class community of people who were arrogant, in control, amused, funny, in power, it doesn’t compute with the English view of history [...].” (qtd. in Landau 4) Paul Long accordingly finds that “[t]he urban milieu [Peaky Blinders] references is one which is largely absent from dramatic representation and rarely licensed for imaginative exploration in British television” (166).

This distinguishes the series from other British historical period dramas such as Downton Abbey (2010-2015), towards which Peaky Blinders assumes an almost antithetical stance, albeit covering a similar time period. While the bright, neat diegetic world of Downton Abbey “celebrat[es] a hierarchical social structure” (Cooke 218) in a nostalgic longing for ‘times more simple’ than that of the 21^st century, Peaky Blinders tackles the absence of authoritative structures, a “normative breakdown” (Shuster 6) as a hallmark of 1919’s as much as today’s (late-) modernity. The world of Peaky Blinders is exemplary of this breakdown, as will be further illustrated below. But there is one exception to this pattern of “normative emptiness” (ibid. 7). “[T]he institution of the family consistently appears exempt from this predicament and such a portrayal”, so Shuster’s central thesis pertaining to ‘new television’ as a whole (6). Crucially, as in Weeds (2005-2012), discussed by Shuster in more detail, ‘new television’ depicts the family “without any pretense [sic!] of ideality: the family structure is not perfect […], and it does not guarantee a world, an alternative to the desert that is modernity” (169). It is thus community that ‘new television’ formulates as a reply to modernity – but not as a solution. Peaky Blinders accordingly fashions the family as a ‘last resort’, and at the same time not as a resort at all, rejecting the normativity entailed by the concept of community and, in particular, by that of the family.