'A Thousand Blows' to Punch Up Hulu in February

The new Steven Knight series, A Thousand Blows, was initially billed as a "historical period drama that revolves around 19th-century era boxing," a subject that's a bit niche but also was, at the time of the announcement, having a moment, as Bridgerton had recently featured it in its first season. However, as the show has grown closer to its 2025 premiere, it seems that the boxing aspect is a bit of a "Trojan Horse," as it were, drawing in viewers with its promise of violence and bare-knuckle brawling successes of Victorian-era Jamaican immigrants.

However, the more recent trailer and synopsis have revealed a show about one of the most notorious, least-covered London gangs in history, known as "The Forty Elephants." British crime syndicates are Knight's specialty, especially once that last generations. His biggest hit to date has been Peaky Blinders, based on the 1880s-era Birmingham Gang of the same name, a historical alternate fiction that posited what would have happened had the gang survived the Great War.

The Forty Elephants (sometimes called The Forty Thieves) were an all-female crime syndicate that lasted for over a century in London before it ended in the 1950s. (Though the first official reference to them is in the 1870s, some date the gang's formation as far back as early as the 1780s.) The women in the gang specialized in shoplifting but had their hands in multiple illegal activities, including the bare-knuckle boxing circuit, making this series even more intriguing the closer it gets to arrival.