Peaky Blinders: The Degradation of Tommy Shelby

The first two series are nearly perfect television. The writing understands that Tommy Shelby is interesting not because he wins but because of what winning costs him. The opium, the dead wife, the recurring vision of the horse — these are not flourishes. They are the structural argument of the show: power is incompatible with whatever made you worth following.

By series five the show has forgotten this. Tommy has become a vehicle for set pieces. The political storyline involving Mosley is historically interesting but dramatically inert because Tommy's suffering is no longer connected to his choices in a way that feels earned. He suffers because the show requires him to, not because his actions have produced consequences.

Cillian Murphy carries it longer than the writing deserves. The silence he brings to scenes — the way he listens before speaking, the stillness that reads as calculation — gives the later series more weight than they have written into them. But performance can only hold so much.

The ending, when it finally came, was the right idea executed with insufficient nerve.