'A Thousand Blows' Is a Victorian-Era Knockout
From writer/creator Steven Knight (Peaky Blinders) comes Hulu’s A Thousand Blows, a stylish series about the rough and tumble streets of London’s East End in the 1880s. Mixing boxing, a gang of female thieves, and stories of immigration, the result is a remarkably entertaining six-episode first season. The theme music of the show’s fantastic score perfectly establishes the tone: a fast-paced, rollicking good time with a savage edge. Mocking voices mix with plucking strings and plinking pianos while guitars groan like elephants and squawk like crows.
(The official trailer is cut to modern music, so I was expecting something anachronistic from the soundtrack; Federico Jusid’s score works better.)
The contrast is stark between the clean, affluent West End of London and its poverty-stricken East End, where the story is set. Knight is brilliant at capturing gritty realness onscreen – you can practically feel the mud under your boots and the dirt on your hands, and it always seems cold. London might just eat you alive, or so believes Mary Carr (Erin Doherty), con artist and self-proclaimed queen of the Forty Elephants, an all-female gang that in real life ran successfully from the 1870s to the 1950s.
