"A Thousand Blows", at its own risk and manly

What feeling can the hyperactive Steven Knight (six series in the last three years), father of the hit Peaky Blinders , have when faced with the recent recuperation of his most famous work by all the wannabe Thomas Shelbys on the planet who love "retro alpha" costumes and outward signs of vintage virility? A certain bitterness, let's hope, since it would be unfair to reduce his work to everything that the masculinist emblemization wanted to make of it; but also, it would seem, a certain very zealous desire to correct the situation. Because if A Thousand Blows wants to be the heir to Peaky Blinders, whose run is due to end soon with a closing film as a seventh season, it is also its double counterpoint, both racial and sexual.

The series follows a double narrative whose two paths struggle to meet: on one side a gang of female thieves who really operated in the last years of Victorian London (the Forty Elephants) and on the other the entry of a Jamaican into the world of underground bare-knuckle boxing, all resulting in a very nimble update of its predecessor's software, combining the classic art of showing off and small proletarian-criminal intrigues with flexed muscles with an overlay of societal resonances aiming at a heavy and unpleasant connivance with