This article contains spoilers for Season 6 of “Peaky Blinders”.
LONDON — “John was a good boy. Arthur tries. Tommy is different,” Aunt Polly (Helen McCrory) says of the Shelby brothers in Season 4 of “Peaky Blinders.”
On the stylish BBC gangster drama (which airs on Netflix in the United States), Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy) is in a class of its own. Although he is the second brother, the ambitious Tommy quickly takes his place as head of the family when he returns to Birmingham, in central England, after fighting in the First World War.
The show’s creator, Steven Knight, has said he sees the show as a western, and Tommy is the outlaw at the center. While the show has spawned many “Peaky” inspired hairstyles and themed events, Tommy, as the defining figure of the story, is the character most fans aspire to. (In 2020, he was named the “greatest TV character of all time” by the male-oriented British website LADbible.)
Though the show has now ended — its final season arrived on Netflix last week — Tommy’s influence will continue as Knight has plans for a feature film set during World War II.
From the beginning of ‘Peaky Blinders’, when the show’s characters were still emerging from the shadows of World War I, masculinity and violence have been inextricably linked. The gang managed to use both physical force and cunning, not to mention the razor blades they supposedly had sewn into their caps. “The only way to guarantee peace is to make the prospect of war seem hopeless,” Tommy argues in Season 3.
When “Peaky Blinders” premiered in Britain in 2013, it joined a TV landscape littered with male antiheroes: “Breaking Bad” and Walter White’s transformation ended the same month that “Peaky” debuted; “Sons of Anarchy”—starring violent motorcyclist Jax Teller in the center—aired its penultimate season that year; and viewers spent six seasons on Don Draper’s journey up the corporate ladder in “Mad Men.”
Tommy fits in well with these other dangerously and seductively flawed leading men. However, through its nature, the show has also explored the impact of trauma on the battlefield, foreshadowing the more explicit mental health-conscious TV we see today.
In Britain, “Peaky Blinders” has received a steady stream of criticism for its stylish depiction of violence, and last year MP Nick Fletcher said Tommy was a particularly negative role model. “Is it any wonder we see so many young men committing crime?” said Fletcher. “These programs make crime look cool.”
Watching a show like “Peaky Blinders” alone isn’t enough to lead to violent behavior, according to psychologist Douglas Gentile, whose work focuses on the impact of mass media. But “all the time you watch a violent show, you’re rehearsing aggressive fantasies,” he said in a recent video interview, and the more you watch, “the more desensitized you become to both media and violence in the real world.”
Understand Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
The invasive symptoms of PTSD can affect combat veterans and civilians alike. Early intervention is critical to managing the condition.
Public conversations about male-perpetrated violence have changed dramatically since “Peaky Blinders” debuted nearly a decade ago. The rise of the #MeToo movement popularized the concept of “toxic masculinity”, which broadly refers to a masculinity model that encourages men to “suppress emotions and mask fearand can lead to aggression, according to the American Psychological Association.
“Peaky Blinders” has gone through an evolution of its own, focusing less on physical combat and more on the internal struggles within Tommy, said Anthony Byrne, who directed seasons 5 and 6.
“Violence is widely used,” he said in a recent telephone interview. “Season 4 was all about gangsterism. I felt like the show had drifted away from what it should have been: the journey of Tommy’s psyche.”
For example, in the final season, Byrne shot a “classic Peaky Blinders” fight scene with Tommy, Arthur and some dock workers. “It just didn’t work and it felt wrong,” he said. “Time had moved on. Tommy had moved on.”
From the beginning, Tommy has struggled with what we now consider post-traumatic stress disorder, which stems from his time in World War I. In Season 6, he suffers from seizures, with his body reflecting the inner turmoil created by the battles at home and abroad.
This vulnerability, according to Julie Taddeo, a historian who focuses on British television, is an essential reason why viewers cherish the character. “He can be a very unsympathetic character,” she said in a recent telephone interview, “but he’s recognizable because we now have a more nuanced understanding of war and trauma.”
Despite the show’s focus on the Peaky Blinders and their conflict, female characters such as Ada Shelby and Aunt Polly are central to Tommy’s trajectory. “I’ve always explored his masculinity through his feminine self,” Byrne said.
“Everything in Tommy’s psyche is ruled by the women in his life, both dead and alive.” he explained. “His mother, who committed suicide by throwing herself into a canal, is kind of a ghost that’s very much Tommy’s subtext.”
We bid Tommy farewell at a time when ideas about masculinity are widening and public figures in Britain like rapper Stormzy and Prince Harry have shared their own mental health issues.
As a result, “our expectations and demands of male characters have certainly expanded and intensified,” Taddeo said. “We want a lot more of these men now.”
This is reflected in shows like “Derry Girls”, whose central father, Gerry (Tommy Tiernan), is more than comfortable expressing his emotions as the characters navigate “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland; “After Life”, in which Ricky Gervais plays a widow whose grief leads him to consider suicide; and “This Is Us,” in which Randall, the lead character played by Sterling K. Brown, struggles with anxiety.
In “Peaky Blinders” the question of redemption hangs over Tommy. In the final season, Tommy says he learns kindness from his children, and in the show’s closing scenes, he chooses not to shoot a man who has wronged him. Instead, he walks away.
“Tommy rides a black horse and out on a white horse, so there’s hope for him,” Byrne said. “Where he’s going, no one knows, but there’s a feature film coming, so the story continues.”