THE NOTICE
Many try it, they are not very successful. The challenge, for series that go beyond the two seasons, is to keep pace (and quality). Since its first broadcast in 2013 on the BBC (2015 in France), Peaky Blinders has proven that it is one of the few productions to always keep its promises or even surpass itself. While the fifth season has just released on the Netflix platform, and will be broadcast on Arte on October 24, the creation of Steven Knight, which staged a mafia gang in Birmingham between the wars, begins a bold turn. Mafia series, it turns gradually into a political series.
Fascism, the new enemy of Peaky Blinders
This turn will not surprise those who had already followed the (very good) season 4. In the end, the leader of the gang of Peaky Blinders, Thomas Shelby, presented himself to the deputation and was found elected thanks to methods inherited from his years petty theft (the stuffing of urns, so). We are now, at the beginning of season 5, in 1929. Parallel to the mafia activities that took the lead in the wing at the time of the stock market crash, the Shelby clan manages the career of its head of gondola, which sits with Labor in the House of Commons. Career inevitably struck during those years 1930 which see raising the accents of fascism everywhere in Europe.
So far, all seasons of Peaky Blinders were built on the same principle (rather effective): faced with a rival gang, the Shelby ended by getting rid of it with more or less plume and loss of life, each victory s' accompanying for this clan of gypsy origin a progression in the social ladder. The real strength of season 5 is to put Thomas Shelby against a new kind of opponent. Oswald Mosley, founder of the British fascist party, to whom the actor Sam Claflin lends his features, seems here to pose an infinitely greater threat, more deaf, than the leader of Scottish gang who will also show all the colors to Peaky Blinders.
Crimes and morality
It is this ability, already seen in the series, to back the fiction (the real Peaky Blinders have never started in politics) to a realistic historical context that makes it the strength. If this incursion on the political side allows a few winks (the appearance of Winston Churchill), historical reminders and parallels with the news (the "Britain's first" of Mosley resonating exactly like the "America First" of Trump), it's mostly a way to thicken again the character of Thomas Shelby, always impeccably interpreted by Cillian Murphy.
The Mafioso who has always followed his personal interest besides the corpses on his way is here confronted with a possibility of action solely motivated by morality. "All this time, you did things that made you happy, because you had the opportunity. [This time], you do that because you think someone should stop [Mosley] Because you think that it's the right thing to do, "sums up his wife, Lizzie, in episode 5. Surely it must go through that for this great trauma of the Great War to overcome his demons. Because it is there, finally, that nestles the real knot of dramatic Peaky Blinders : Thomas Shelby goes, at the end of the seven seasons promised by Steven Knight, finally to find the peace?