Peaky Blinders is Anything but …
So much of Brit television is recycled chum thrown overboard into an ocean of complacent streaming. It is often repetitive with stories that are as predictable and preposterous as they are boring and melodramatic. Peaky Blinders is anything but.
In many ways, it is a revisionist “American western” set in a desolate Birmingham, England.
Civilization in Birmingham is plunged deep within the maelstrom shadows of sweat, mayhem and violence. Personal morality strains under the appeal of barbaric materialism.
From the start a horse mounted and proud Romani, Tommy Shelby canters through the demonic, moody Birmingham mists. Nick Cave's “red right hand” heralds his appearance. Birmingham is ablaze with bludgeoning hammers and battered anvils.
We come to learn that Tommy Shelby had tunneled, traumatized, out of the Great War to reshape the 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 Neill) is the sanctimonious and sadistic personification of law in the world that Tommy tries to order mid the chaos.
Throughout the series, Tommy’s world is a house of betting slips. Whether it was Tommy's panic attacks and night terrors or his brother Arthur's alcoholism with chasers of uncontrollable violence, post traumatic stress is very much a part of the Shelby way of life.
Intrigues abounds.
Atmospheric cinematography and a hip soundtracking usher in stellar drama in which an intrepid Tommy remains shackled metaphorically to family and especially to mad-as-a-hatter Arthur. Bespoke and doffing flat caps pocketed with razor blades, the Shelby family is first and foremost.
As all viewers came 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. An excellent Cillian Murphy, with guest actors Tom Hardy, Adrian Brody and Aiden Gillian, make Knight's Peaky Blinders one of the outstanding streaming shows available on Netflix, and for that matter, on any other platform.
While so many others counted the calculable number of cigarettes that Tommy smoked or noted that in 36 episodes Tommy doesn’t stop for a snack. (Brit gangsters do not live on bread alone). We at Broken Glass Loft sought to memorialize this streaming masterpiece in stained glass, as a tribute to its endurance and its masterful story telling.