Peaky Blinders

About the series

Contains story spoilers.

Peaky Blinders opens in Birmingham in 1919, after the First World War, with Thomas “Tommy” Shelby leading a street gang whose razor-sewn caps give it its name. Tommy and his brothers Arthur and John have returned from the trenches to a city marked by poverty, labor unrest and political change. When the gang accidentally acquires a shipment of guns, Tommy’s plan to build the family’s betting and criminal businesses attracts the attention of Chief Inspector Chester Campbell, who has been sent to recover the weapons. Undercover agent Grace Burgess takes a job at the Shelby-owned Garrison pub to report on Tommy, but their attraction complicates her assignment and his calculations. Around them, Aunt Polly manages the family’s affairs, while Ada’s relationship with socialist Freddie Thorne connects the Shelbys to working-class organizing. The series frames the gang’s rise alongside a family trying to turn wartime survival into power and respectability.

Tommy’s expansion repeatedly pulls the Shelbys beyond Birmingham and forces them to negotiate with enemies whose power takes different forms. In the second series, the gang moves into London’s racecourses and nightlife, colliding with Darby Sabini and forming an uneasy business relationship with Alfie Solomons. A returning rival and Campbell’s pressure draw Tommy into a covert operation for the Crown, while Polly searches for the children taken from her and is reunited with her son Michael, who enters the family business. By the third series, Tommy and Grace are married and living in a country house, far from Small Heath, but wealth does not free him from coercion. Father John Hughes and the Economic League pull him into a dangerous scheme involving exiled White Russians and an arms deal. The conspiracy ends in personal catastrophe: Grace is killed, Hughes is killed, and Tommy’s relatives are arrested. The more legitimate the family appears, the more its criminal history and political usefulness expose it to manipulation.

After the arrests, an Italian vendetta brings the story back to Birmingham. Luca Changretta targets the Shelbys over the killing of his father, and John is killed in an ambush that also puts Michael in danger. Tommy tries to protect the family while adapting the business, but change brings conflict inside as well as outside the gang. The factory becomes a site of labor struggle when union organizer Jessie Eden challenges its conditions and the treatment of women workers. Polly and other women join the action, making the family’s interests collide with demands they cannot dismiss as mere criminal interference. Arthur, presumed dead after Luca’s plot, returns to help turn the vendetta against its author. Tommy wins a seat in Parliament as Labour MP for Birmingham, taking the family’s influence into Westminster. That shift does not erase the gang; it gives Tommy a route toward political power and places him beside figures whose ambitions threaten the democratic and social world around his family.

The series advances through recognizable landmarks of interwar Britain, but it uses those events as pressure on fictional family choices rather than presenting a documentary account. The postwar labor movement, the first Labour government, the 1926 strike, the Wall Street crash and fascist organizing alter what kind of power Tommy can pursue and who can threaten him. Real figures such as Winston Churchill and Oswald Mosley enter the story alongside invented criminals and political plots. The changing decade also registers in the Shelbys’ circumstances: from crowded Small Heath streets to country estates, London business and parliamentary offices. Their new status changes their surroundings, but does not settle their loyalties or repair the costs of violence.

The 1929 Wall Street crash disrupts the family’s finances and brings Michael back from America with his fiancée Gina, whose confidence and ambitions intensify an existing divide over how the business should be run. Tommy’s parliamentary role introduces him to Oswald Mosley, the real British fascist leader, and becomes a cover for an attempt to kill him. The plan fails, Mosley survives, and Tommy ends the fifth series in despair, holding a gun to himself. The final series begins with that crisis unresolved and with Polly absent after Helen McCrory’s death; within the story, the IRA has killed her. Michael blames Tommy and pursues revenge, while the family faces new threats from American businessman Jack Nelson and the political network around Mosley. Ruby’s illness and death devastate Tommy and his marriage to Lizzie. Esme reveals that Tommy has a son, Duke, conceived before the war. Duke joins the gang and takes a forceful role in its internal conflicts.

The finale resolves the original television story without settling every consequence of Tommy’s criminal and political life. Arthur kills Captain Swing, identified as Polly’s killer, and Tommy outmaneuvers Michael’s attempt to kill him; After Michael’s bomb is moved to another vehicle and his attempt fails, Tommy kills him. Billy Grade is killed for betraying the family, while Finn is expelled rather than killed. Lizzie leaves Tommy and takes Charles with her. Believing he has an inoperable brain tumor, Tommy gives away his possessions, burns his home and prepares to die. He discovers that Dr. Holford’s diagnosis was a fascist plot tied to Mosley, chooses not to kill the doctor, and rides away on a white horse after his effects burn. The ending leaves Tommy alive and his next direction unresolved. His survival gives the closing image an uneasy hope: he can choose to live, but the people he has lost and the political forces he helped negotiate do not disappear with his possessions.