Steven Knight’s Enjoyable Hulu Boxing Drama

Several great stories about the underbelly of Victorian London get smushed together to yield something less great but often extremely entertaining in Steven Knight‘s new Hulu drama, A Thousand Blows.

Knight comes off less like a master storyteller here than a highly enthusiastic autodidact learning new things and then flailing a bit in making connections. That just means that, at its worst, A Thousand Blows — which caps these first six episodes with a “To Be Continued” title card and clips from additional upcoming episodes — will send interested observers online in search of the true stories about all-female criminal gangs, nascent gloved boxing and 19th-century concert hall performers.

So you’ve got well-acted, well-produced, genre-bending period television and an inspiration to do further research? You could do far worse, and the wildly prolific Knight — he of Peaky Blinders, The Veil and All the Light We Cannot See — has done both better and worse.

Malachi Kirby tops the ensemble as the spectacularly named (and real) Hezekiah Moscow, who arrives in London’s East End from Kingston, Jamaica. Hezekiah, accompanied by bestie Alec Munroe (Francis Lovehall), dreams of becoming a lion tamer but is quick to discover that Victorian London isn’t always welcoming to newcomers.

Soon, Hezekiah becomes involved with Mary Carr (Erin Doherty), leader of the aforementioned all-female crime syndicate The Forty Elephants, and he runs afoul of Sugar Goodson (Stephen Graham), a legendary tavern owner and bare-knuckle boxer. Hezekiah, who has some background in fighting himself, could become a pioneer in the world of legitimized pugilism, or a cautionary tale in the world of organized crime, or he could find himself embroiled in an international scandal when Mary hatches a plan for a grand heist tied to a visit from the Chinese trade delegation.

Helping flesh out this world are characters including Sugar Goodson’s brother Treacle (James Nelson-Joyce), Chinese immigrant and inn proprietor Lao (Jason Tobin), and several of Mary’s Elephants.

Like Hezekiah, Mary, Alec, Sugar and Treacle are all real historic personages, as are figures like royal goddaughter Victoria Davies, trapeze performer and Degas muse Miss La La, mustachioed fight impresario Peggy Bettinson and more. Don’t bother attempting to create a workable timeline in which these characters could have interacted, much less interact in these ways. A Thousand Blows takes exhaustive liberties, but it’s easy to see what, conceptually, attracted Knight to these colorful figures and this smoky, filthy society on the brink of what we see as “modernity.”

A Thousand Blows is at its best when Knight and the series directors are feeling their way around the show’s world, realized in grimy detail by production designer Tom Burton, costume designer Maja Meschede and the crew. For all that has to be fictionalized in the overall story, much (or possibly “most”) of the texture and ephemera is based on frequently edifying facts. The six episodes are packed with expositional scenes in which an experienced character walks a neophyte through a new environment, giving the lay of the cultural land as if talking about quadrants in a middle school lunchroom. Such scenes are educational, or at least serve as a gateway for educational Googling.

Lots of the characters offer a fascination derived from condensing years of biographical data into a very tight window. Hezekiah comes equipped with years of colonialist trauma, while his lion-taming aspirations pay off in a fantastic early scene at a run-down London zoo (and then never are relevant again). Mary’s childhood has all of the workhouse tragedy of a Dickens novel, plus insufficient scenes of Susan Lynch as a stern, matronly figure from her youth. Adding to that Dickensian flair — Knight’s love of Dickens has included FX’s adaptations of A Christmas Carol and Great Expectations — is Graham’s Sugar, who makes Bill Sikes look temperate. Lao’s backstory is thinly presented, but it becomes essential to the season, plus Tobin’s thoughtful, frequently funny presence allowed me to just connect A Thousand Blows to Cinemax’s Warrior.

Warrior is just one of several shows that A Thousand Blows is likely to remind people of, along with Knight’s Peaky Blinders, the somewhat contemporaneous Ripper Street, Hulu’s recent Oliver Twist sequel The Artful Dodger and more. In fact, after the first few episodes sets the series up by introducing all its distinctive elements, the second half of the season feels increasingly like, well, a TV show rather than a glimpse into the pages of a book of hidden history. There’s a love triangle, a heist and all the underdog sports training montages you could possibly want. And since I like underdog sports stories and heist stories, my complaints are limited to how A Thousand Blows starts off jagged and dangerous and interesting, only to become very conventional.

The performances, especially at the top, are excellent. Kirby, who should have been a breakout star after playing Kunta Kinte in the 2016 Roots remake or after his lead role in the Mangrove installment of Small Axe, has Jamaican roots and does solid accent work as well as delivering a confident physical performance in the boxing scenes. Graham is an untethered wolverine as the vicious Sugar, with just enough quiet moments to convey the character’s inner torment. And if you only know Doherty as Princess Anne from the middle cast of The Crown, she’s a tough-talking, proto-feminist delight as the uncouth but chameleonic Mary.

Some of the supporting actors — especially Nelson-Joyce as Sugar’s somewhat more reasonable brother, Darci Shaw as a new Elephant recruit and Adam Nagaitis as a foppish boxing aficianado — help round this busy universe out nicely, though it’s disappointing how many seemingly central characters get forgotten about for long stretches. Lovehall and Morgan Hilaire, as Mary’s right-hand woman, seem like they might have been co-leads in an eight-episode version of the story, but had their roles hacked to near-absence in these rushed six.

The rushing feels odder because of the teases for the second season (or second half of the first season) that follow the finale — clips that indicate both ample, wild fun on the horizon and suggest that almost everything in these initial episodes could have been allowed to breathe. Knight loves this world — and, in these six episodes, I quickly liked it, wishing to like it even more.