Hulu's 'A Thousand Blows' Trailer Sees Stephen Graham Enter the Ring

"You are in London. And this city makes only one promise — that it will kill you the first chance it gets." Such is the promise at the heart of the teaser for Hulu's A Thousand Blows, a period drama teaming with the sort of grit and violence you don't necessarily expect to see in a series set in traditionally prim Victorian England. But this is a series from Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, a storyteller who has seemingly always been fascinated with the dark underbelly of this particular genre. His post-war Birmingham gangster drama was brutal in almost every sense of the word, from the literal bloodshed on its streets to the increasingly flexible morality of virtually every central character.

His latest project seems to follow a similar path. (It's not an accident that this show bears so many visual similarities to its predecessor, is what I'm saying.) In A Thousand Blows, Knight shifts his setting a few decades earlier and trades gun-running and drug dealing for the violent world of East London's underground bare-knuckle boxing scene. While its story will undoubtedly take its fair share of liberties with little-known facts, it will primarily be based on the lives of actual historical figures.

The series follows the story of Hezekiah Moskow (Malachi Kirby), an immigrant from Jamaica whose success in the ring brings him into conflict with a veteran boxer named Sugar Goodson (Stephen Graham). (Fun fact: The real Sugar Goodson had a brother who also boxed and went by the nickname Treacle.) Hezekiah's skills will also apparently catch the eye of the infamous Mary Carr (Erin Doherty), the leader of the girl gang known as The Forty Elephants, whose members were known for their skill at shoplifting and fencing stolen goods.