The Crime Drama That Will Enthrall and Repel You

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The show is set in a version of modern-day London where a consortium of gangs, uneasily brought together by the Irish mobster Finn Wallace (played by Colm Meaney), is responsible for virtually all crime. When Finn is murdered in the first episode, his death leaves a void the rival factions begin battling to fill, while Finn’s son, Sean (Joe Cole), vows, with Hamlet-esque perma-gloom and furious consonants, to avenge his father’s death. (Sean spends more time surveying his city from above than Batman.) Much as when watching The Wire, your allegiances might shift depending on who’s in conflict with whom at any given moment. The most obviously sympathetic character is Elliot (Sope Dirisu), a policeman who manages to infiltrate the Wallace organization, and whose ability to dispatch enemies with breathtaking ingenuity is both his operating principle and the show’s superpower.

Gangs of London’s intramural conflicts are numerous, detailed, and begrudging enough to occupy a George R. R. Martin novel. In the show’s lore, Finn built his family firm, body by body, in partnership with Ed Dumani (Lucian Msamati)—they were both “illegitimate bastard children of the great British Empire,” as Ed puts it. Ed’s son, the dashing financier Alex (Paapa Essiedu), helps run an investment company that launders billions of dirty pounds into empty skyscrapers that litter the London skyline. Within the consortium are the enigmatic Lale (Narges Rashidi), a Kurdish militant who runs a heroin operation to fund guerrilla fighters in her home country, and Asif (Asif Raza Mir), a ruthless Pakistani drug lord whose son is running for London mayor on an anti-capitalist platform. Also in the mix are groomed Albanian mafiosi and hirsute Welsh travelers and flaxen Danish assassins, all cheerfully plying their trade and murdering each other in a slightly exaggerated interpretation of Boris Johnson’s “Global Britain.”

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Evans established himself as a propulsive action director with The Raid, a 2011 thriller about an elite Indonesian police squad facing off against a drug lord within a single Jakarta high-rise. Violence, in his work, is less a quality than an exercise in tweaking and testing sequences for maximum impact. To watch his fight scenes is to be enthralled and repelled by the physics of what’s happening on-screen—the mechanical reaction of a bullet hitting flesh or the specific crunch of a hammer hitting a kneecap. But Evans and his co-creator, the cinematographer and writer Matt Flannery, wield tension even more excruciatingly than mayhem. A fight scene in an East London squat, enclosed by bloodied walls with lurid Day-Glo graffiti, is made more nightmarish by preceding scenes of incipient dread. And a chaotic gun battle between a makeshift army of orphans and a merciless paramilitary unit is emotionally riveting in its high drama even though both sides, for viewers, are virtually unknown.