'Peaky Blinders' Season 5 Gets A Netflix Premiere Date
The first trailer for Peaky Blinders Season 5 makes good on the promise to take the series towards World War II this October.
Peaky Blinders is one of those BBC series that's been bubbling under the surface of breaking big in the United States for years. A gangster epic that begins during the post-Great War landscape in Birmingham, England, the show started on BBC Two back in September of 2013, with a follow-up season the next year in October. It was at about that time the show got picked up by Netflix as part of their first wave of BBC content. (Black Mirror also got acquired around the same time, for reference.) But where Netflix was able to seize the rights to Black Mirror and pump it up, Peaky Blinders has remained a bit of an also-ran. It never quite found a massive audience the way, say, Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries did.
But the show has been a slow build in the U.K. as well. It wasn't until the initial run of three seasons had finished in 2016 that the BBC decided to sign up for two more. Season 4 took 18 months to make it to TV before it aired at the end of 2017. But the wait and word of mouth by then brought the viewership numbers high enough that the network decided to promote it to the big leagues. The upcoming Season 5 will be the first to air on BBC One, starting in August. It also now has a premiere date on Netflix in the U.S. as well: October 4, 2019.
The period-set series began in 1919, focused on telling the story of the real-life Peaky Blinders urban street gang. The initial crew ran a gambling ring that grew to exert political influence over the city from the end of the 19th century until the start of the First World War. The show creates a fictionalized version that started up again when the war ended and ran Birmingham during the interwar period between 1919-1940, with the Shelby family as the central hub. Much like Downton Abbey, it chronicles real-life historical events through the lens of its fictionalized family. Though, in this case, it's from the bottom up on Birmingham's streets, instead of the top-down landed gentry.
Season 4 ended in with the General Strike of May 1926. Season 5 is expected to pick up with the financial crash of 1929. Here's the trailer.
The cast for Season 5 will once again center around Cillian Murphy's patriarch Tommy Shelby, with Paul Anderson (The Great Train Robbery) as Tommy's brother Arthur Shelby. Sophie Rundle (Bodyguard, Jamestown), who plays Ada Thorne, and Helen McCrory (Harry Potter), who plays Polly Gray, are also set to return, along with Finn Cole (Animal Kingdom) as Polly's son Michael Gray. Also, Kate Phillips (Wolf Hall) is back as Arthur’s wife Linda, while Natasha O’Keeffe (Sherlock) is Tommy's new wife, Lizzie Stark.
The show's sprawling cast also includes Charlie Murphy (Happy Valley), Kingsley Ben-Adir (Vera), Packy Lee (The Witcher), Ned Dennehy (Good Omens), Ian Peck (Harry Potter), and Aidan Gillen (Game of Thrones). Guest stars for this season include Sam Claflin (The Hunger Games), Emmett J Scanlan (The Fall), Anya Taylor-Joy (The Miniaturist), Brian Gleeson (Phantom Thread), Kate Dickie (Game of Thrones), Cosmo Jarvis (My Mother and Other Strangers), and Elliot Cowan (The Spanish Princess), plus Charlene McKenna (Ripper Street), Andrew Koji (Call The Midwife), and Daryl McCormack (A Very English Scandal).
Peaky Blinders Season 5 will premeire on BBC One on Sunday, Aug. 25, 2019. The full season will follow on Netflix in the U.S. beginning Oct. 4, 2019.
