How Peaky Blinders Changed British Period Drama

screenrant.com:

Peaky Blinders differed from previous British period dramas, and in doing so, it changed the genre and showed what was possible in episodic TV storytelling. Set in Britain between the First and Second World Wars, Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy) and his family were shockingly unlike the dames in ball gowns audiences had grown to expect from a British drama set in this period of history. Peaky Blinders was the breath of fresh air the genre needed.

First airing in 2013, Peaky Blinders tracked the rise of an ambitious Birmingham-based gang that shares its name with the show. The Shelby family accumulated wealth and power over the course of six seasons through gambling initiatives, the export of motorcars, and covert missions for the British government. But no matter how high Peaky Blinders' Shelby family climbed, they maintained their blue-collar, working-class roots. Canal boats, scrap metal yards, factories, flat caps, and the dirty streets of Small Heath remained integral to both the show and the characters.

Related: Peaky Blinders: What Tommy Shelby's Chest Tattoo Means

Peaky Blinders defied the traditional format of British period dramas by mythologizing the British working class rather than lionizing the upper crust and British peerage. The show’s creator, Steven Knight, said, “I wanted to show that working-class characters could have agency and ambition, that they weren’t just underlings.” (via The New Statesman) Not only were working-class characters moved to the forefront of Knight’s period drama, but they were also glamorized. Peaky Blinders made being anything other than, as Tommy put it, “an ordinary working man” unfashionable.

Before Peaky Blinders, true working-class stories had largely been ignored in British