BGL’s Peaky Blinders

BGL’s second project, taking about five months, was a tribute to Peaky Blinders, a brilliant British crime drama featuring Cillian Murphy as Tommy Shelby. BGL’s Peaky Blinders is approximately the same size as Breaking Bad, but more intricate.

Peaky Blinders is a revisionist American western set in a desolate Birmingham, England.

Civilization in Birmingham is plunged deep within the shadows of sweat, mayhem and violence. Personal morality strains under the appeal of barbaric materialism. 

At the start, a horse mounted Tommy Shelby canters through the demonic, moody Birmingham mists. Nick Caves’s Red Right Hand heralds his appearance. Birmingham is ablaze with bludgeoning hammers and battered anvils. 

Tommy Shelby, traumatized, had tunneled out of the Great War to reshape the new world around him, to recast commandments for others to obey and to manipulate friends, family and enemies along the way. 

His family, the Shelbys, and their spectral bookmaker empire are helmed by Aunt Polly (the incomparable, late Helen McCrory). Aunt Polly corrals the sullen siblings and tillers their blood-soaked bookmaking.

Pipe smoking Major Campbell (Sam Neil) is the sanctimonious, sadistic personification of law in the world that Tommy tries to order amid the chaos. 

Throughout the series, Tommy’s world is a house of betting slips. Whether it was Tommy's panic attacks and his night terrors or his brother Arthur's alcoholism with its chasers of uncontrollable violence,  post traumatic stress is very much a part of the Shelby way of life.

Intrigues abound. 

Atmospheric cinematography and a hip soundtracking usher in stellar drama in which an intrepid Tommy remains shackled metaphorically to family and especially to his mad-as-a-hatter brother, Arthur. Modishly doffing flat caps pocketed with razor blades, the Shelby family is always first and foremost.

As viewers come to realize, Tommy has things to do because Tommy knows well that a gangster life, foreshadowed in the terrors of night, will be foreshortened. 

Steven Knight crafted these highly entertaining, human if not humane, escapades and set them in a traumatized England, slouching into the twentieth century. Peaky Blinders stars an excellent Cillian Murphy and has guest actors with the full mastery of all that is acting talent: Tom Hardy, Aiden Gillen and Adrien Brody.

Peaky Blinders is one of the outstanding streaming shows available on Netflix, and for that matter, on any other platform.