"Peaky Blinders" creator Steven Knight doesn't make dull television, and his latest series – for Disney+ – "may be his best yet", said Benji Wilson in The Telegraph. Set in late 19th-century London, it stars Erin Doherty as the leader of a gang of female pickpockets. Also in the mix is Malachi Kirby, as a Jamaican who finds himself thrust into the East End's thriving bare-knuckle boxing scene. There, he soon threatens the supremacy of Stephen Graham's Sugar Goodson, a publican who is the scene's "self-styled alpha". The series is deeply violent – the clue's in the title – "but if you can get past that", it's "blockbuster" TV with a "sensational" performance from Doherty.
Like "Peaky Blinders", this series is "very moreish", said Carol Midgley in The Times: it grabbed me by "the scruff of the neck", and forced me to binge-watch it all. And while "there is the odd clunky line", and a "pretty preposterous" plot twist later on, it "viscerally" brings to life the "grime, chaos, danger and cunning but also the sheer energy of the East End".
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