Let me first say how impressed I was with the quality of this production in its technical and artistic aspects. This really is a step above what I would have expected from a British TV production.

Of course it plays with tropes all across the British Gangster genre, and a list of movies and TV shows it owes a debt to would be really long. It even borrows from things like Dallas and Dynasty. But the obvious debt is to The Long Good Friday. Despite the preponderance of blood and splatter there is an almost ironic tongue in cheek aspect to all this. I don't think anyone wants us to take this too seriously, not the least because the plot is fantastical and relies on us ignoring any real life ideas about crime and policing.

If I have a problem, beyond believability, it is that almost none of the villains, nor even many of the cops, are actually ethnically English. Peculiar for a story about gangs of London. The three cops are (ethnically) Black, Chinese and Southern Mediterranean. The villains are, variously: Irish; Welsh Travellers; Afro Caribbean; Nigerian; Chinese; Albanian; Pakistani; Albanian; and Kurdish. Not a cockney spinning out rhyming slang to be seen or heard. Not even a wide boy. But of course the villains sitting on top of the criminal tree, only seen and heard for a few moments, are old boy (and girl) English establishment figures. But yeah, tropes. As soon as we know Tim McInnerny is in this we already know who the real villain is.

I hope when a second season eventuates that the writers decide to put the playing with tropes thing behind us and generate some real story telling. Things we haven't seen before and that genuinely surprise, for reasons other than mere implausibility.