Peaky Blinders marches its gangsters from post-war Birmingham to the rise of Mosley
Steven Knight's crime saga opens in 1919, months after the First World War, with a Birmingham family of Irish Traveller and Romani descent running a street gang. Across six series it follows Tommy Shelby from betting pitches to Parliament, pitting him against Churchill's men, the New York Mafia and Britain's fascists.
The real Peaky Blinders were a youth gang active in Birmingham from the 1880s to the 1920s, and Knight's fictional clan is only loosely drawn from them. Cillian Murphy leads as Tommy, the calculating boss, with Helen McCrory as his aunt Polly Gray, the family's treasurer, and Paul Anderson as elder brother Arthur. The show premiered on 12 September 2013 on BBC Two, moved to BBC One for its last two series, and reached a worldwide audience through Netflix.
The first series sets Tommy against Major Chester Campbell, played by Sam Neill, a Royal Irish Constabulary officer brought from Belfast on Winston Churchill's orders to restore order and recover a stolen stash of weapons bound for Libya. It climaxes on 3 December 1919, the gang's planned takeover of Billy Kimber's pitches at the Worcester Races. The second series pushes into London, where Tom Hardy's Alfie Solomons runs a Jewish gang in Camden Town, and ends at Epsom on Derby Day, 31 May 1922.
Later stories widen the canvas. In 1924 the family tangles with exiled Russian aristocrats and an anti-communist priest played by Paddy Considine. The fourth series opens on Christmas Eve 1925 as Adrien Brody's mafioso Luca Changretta arrives seeking revenge for his father, and closes after the general strike of May 1926, with Tommy sliding into politics and winning a seat in the Commons in 1927.
The final stretch turns darker. The fifth series runs from Black Tuesday, 29 October 1929, to the morning after a rally led by Oswald Mosley that December. The sixth begins on 5 December 1933, as American prohibition ends and Nazi power in Germany swells the ranks of Mosley's British Union of Fascists, while the Irish Mob and the anti-Treaty IRA plot against Tommy. Announced as the last in January 2021, it aired in 2022, and a follow-up film, The Immortal Man, set a few years later, arrived on 6 March 2026.
Source: Peaky Blinders (TV series)
