Our First Look at 'Dope Girls' Celebrates Women's Wrongs

Thanks in no small part to creator Steven Knight, the concept of the gritty early 20th-century period drama is having something of a moment. A direct contrast to the more lavish, high-end dramas like Downton Abbey or Bridgerton, these stories tend to focus on working or lower-class characters in settings that look very different from the gilded halls of Highclere Castle. But, as the old saying goes, what's good for the goose is good for the gander, and The forthcoming BBC series Dope Girls looks primed to put a feminist spin on Knight's style of period crime drama.

The drama, inspired by Marek Kohn’s nonfiction book Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground, is set in London in 1918, just after the war ended. A generation of newly empowered women was reluctant to give up the self-sufficiency (and earning potential) they'd gained during the war years. The series focuses specifically on the forgotten time in history when female gangs were running the clubs in London's Soho, dealing in drugs and moonshine. Dope Girls aims to detail the birth of the modern nightlife industry guided and gilded by hard-fought female endeavor.

Much of this trend is due to the massive success of Knight's Peaky Blinders, the popular Birmingham-set gangster family drama that ran for six seasons and made a star out of Cillian Murphy (Oppenheimer). (Knight's next series, the Victorian boxing drama involving the all-female gang Forty Elephants, A Thousand Blows, will arrive in February.)

The series stars Julianne Nicholson (Mare of Easttown) as Kate Galloway, a single mother who opens a nightclub in post-World War I London, embracing a criminal lifestyle in the hopes of providing for her daughter Evie. Eliza Scanlen (Little Women) plays Violet Davies, a member of the first wave of female officers to join the Metropolitan Police, who is assigned to go undercover to investigate Soho's illicit underground scene. 

These two women are clearly on a collision course with each other, and the only question will be how they manage to cross into each other's lives.

The Dope Girls ensemble also features Umi Myers (Bob Marley: One Love) as Billie Cassidy, a dazzling bohemian dancer whose life is turned upside down by Kate's arrival in Soho, and Geraldine James (Silo) as Isabella, the leader of the criminal Salucci crime family, which also includes Rory Fleck Byrne (This is Going to Hurt) as Luca Salucci, Dustin Demri-Burns (Slow Horses) as Damasco Salucci, Eben Figueiredo (The Serial Killer's Wife) as Matteo Rossi Salucci and Sebastian Croft (Heartstopper) as Silvio Salucci. 

Other notable cast members include Michael Duke (Get Up Stand Up) as Eddie Cobb, Ian Bonar (I May Destroy You) as Sgt. Frank Turner, Laura Checkley (Detectorists) as Sarah Fisher, Will Keen (His Dark Materials) as Frederick Asquith-Gore, Fiona Button (The Split) as Sophie Asquith-Gore, Harry Cadby (Everything Now) as Jimmy Conville, Nabhaan Rizwan (Kaos) as Silas Huxley, Priya Kansara (Polite Society) as Lily Lee, and Jordan Kouame (Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light) as Reggie Regbo. 

Here's the series' synopsis. 

It is the end of World War One. As Britain celebrates the Armistice on the streets of London, men return from the front expecting to rejoin society and pick up where they left off - but a newly empowered generation of women are loath to simply return to the kitchen.

Using Soho’s expanding illicit underground clubland scene as their playground, women explore previously unimaginable opportunities on either side of the law.

Dope Girls is created by Polly Stenham (The Neon Demon) and Alex Warren (Eleanor), who also serve as lead writers on the series. They're joined by Matthew Barry (Industry), Matthew Jacobs Morgan (The Rig), and Xiao Tang (You Killed My Robot). Shannon Murphy (Killing Eve) is the lead director with Miranda Bowen (Women in Love) also helming episodes.

Stenham, Warren, and Barry will also serve as executive producers, alongside Kate Crowther and Jane Tranter from Bad Wolf, Michael Lesslie for Storyteller Productions, and Rebecca Ferguson for the BBC.

Bad Wolf’s Director of Content, Dan McCulloch, and Chief Creative Officer, Ryan Rasmussen, developed and oversaw the project. Dope Girls will premiere on BBC One and BBC iPlayer in 2025. 

Dope Girls does not yet have an American distributor, but Sony Pictures Television is handling international sales.