In the Flesh: A Thousand Blows

There’s a little too much of the currently omnipresent orange and blue color scheme at play in Steven Knight’s A Thousand Blows, and that’s about the harshest thing I can find to say about it. The rest is a real delight, and the first thing since Deadwood to really foreground the “community” in “criminal community” in a way both naturalistic and compelling, placing its largely dirt-poor characters in a context where their conflicts feel nightmarishly high-stakes due to their necessary interdependence. The women of the East End gang the Forty Elephants, led by the daring and cold-hearted Mary Carr (Erin Doherty) need each other to survive, just as they rely on bare-knuckle boxing champion Henry “Sugar” Goodson for protection, who in turn relies on a symbiotic relationship with local police, themselves squeezed from above by royal agents, and so on and so forth up to the Queen herself.

Doherty is perhaps the smartest piece of casting in the show’s arsenal, aided by her marvelously idiosyncratic features, which like mercury seem to shift in character with each new mood and angle. One moment she’s winningly irreverent, the next dead-eyed and vacant. Casting an actress with an actually interesting face goes a long way toward establishing a unique and engaging tone, and Doherty fits the bill, playing beautifully off of Graham as Sugar and the almost preposterously handsome Malachi Kirby as Jamaican boxer Hezekiah Moscow, her partner in crime and occasional lover. The way the show handles the racist sentiment surrounding both Moscow’s rise in the boxing world and the first rumbles of the British Empire’s colonial collapse is admirably straightforward, depicting racism and eugenics in all the frothing, stupid awfulness with which they’re currently eating the modern world from the inside out.

The series is much more than competently shot, with beautiful framing and painstakingly recreated East End squalor in virtually every shot. A West End shop the Elephants rob in a scene perhaps three minutes from end to end is so beautifully realized it feels like it arrived straight from the pages of Emilė Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise, and the suburban estate of Lord Lonsdale (Adam Nagaitis, beautiful and insufferably smug, but possessed of an odd species of sportsmanship) looks so utterly real that you almost forget you’re watching TV. From the minute the spry little man leaps out of bed and begins jabbing at his long-suffering butler’s face like an overgrown brat, the whole place feels like an extension of his body, and indeed it takes his literal beating at Hezekiah’s hands for the Elephants to pull off their daring heist.

Actors and setting aside, though, it’s the boxing by which A Thousand Blows does or dies, and after a smidge of hesitant early choreography in the pilot, what it delivers is a masterclass in staged bloodsport. The camera moves through each blow and clinch. It comes in low and off balance like the fighters themselves as they reel and stagger. This isn’t just a bag of visual tricks, it’s a cohesive approach to mapping the bodies of the fighters and their points of intersection as they struggle to break each other down in brutal competition. We’re in the ring with them, feeling every bone-breaking impact, standing in the nausea of repeated blows to the head and stomach. It’s an exhilarating feeling, and one I, personally, can’t wait to see more of.