The Final Season of 'Top Boy' Promises to Go Out with a Bang

When Top Boy premiered over a decade ago, in 2011, on Channel 4, it was not the sort of series one would expect to be still running in 2023. The British crime thriller was a scant four episodes long and ran consecutive nights between Halloween and Guy Fawkes. Created and written by Ronan Bennett, the Irish author known for series like Gunpowder, with a nearly all-Black cast, it was set in the fictional Summerhouse estate in the London Borough of Hackney, centered around a pair of teen drug dealers Dushane (Ashley Walters) and Sully (Kane Robinson), trying to survive the violence of London.

The series managed one more four-episode run two years later, in 2013, before Channel 4 dropped it, citing poor viewership. However, the following year, Netflix scooped up the eight episodes for streaming and a whole host of British TV to help fill their coffers, giving the show a new life and audience, including rapper-producer Drake. The mogul and the streaming service announced in 2017 they would team up to revive the show, bringing back Walters and Robinson, plus former stars of the show Sharon Duncan-Brewster (Years and Years), Shone Romulus (The Intent), and Giacomo Mancini (The King).

However, instead of continuing the numbers, Netflix declared the show a "new" Top Boy series and started over with Season 1, with the original eight episodes retitled Top Boy: Summerhouse. The new Season 1, released in 2019, followed Netflix's trend of running ten episodes, and the new Season 2 (or Season 4 if you like), released in 2022, ran eight. Now Season 3 (or Season 5, if you want) will wrap up the show, having launched the careers of many of the original cast.