Few creators do addictive crime dramas quite like Steven Knight. His latest, A Thousand Blows, arrives on Hulu next month and transports viewers to the brutal East End of London in the 1880s — which, I should note, is a couple decades or so before characters in another of Knight’s dramas, Peaky Blinders, head off to fight in World War I.
“London. The lion’s den,” Stephen Graham’s “Sugar Goodson,” the menacing self-declared emperor of the East End boxing world, snarls at one point in Knight’s new six-episode series. “Don’t matter if you were raised here or you just got here. You learn to fight — or this city will swallow you whole.”
A Thousand Blows, which debuts on Feb. 21, is inspired by true-life stories of characters battling for survival during this period, similar to how Knight’s Peaky Blinders was based on a real-life gang that operated in Birmingham, England, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the new Hulu show, Hezekiah Moscow and Alec Munroe are best friends on the run from Jamaica, and they find themselves thrust into the criminal underbelly of London’s bare-knuckle boxing scene.
From Hulu’s summary of A Thousand Blows: “As Hezekiah finds fortune and fame through the art of pugilism, he attracts the attention of the infamous Queen of the Forty Elephants, Mary Carr, who sets about exploiting his talents to further her criminal enterprise.” Meanwhile, Goodson is determined to destroy Hezekiah, whose ambition to fight in the West End threatens everything Goodson has built. What the show comes down to, essentially, is a battle of the old world against the new one.
Anyone who was a fan of Knight’s previous work and loved the characters in the Shelby clan is sure to be a fan of his new Hulu project. The story in A Thousand Blows is one of a vibrant criminal underworld and clashes between underdogs and foreboding rivals. You can never have too many British crime dramas in your life, as far as I’m concerned.
