Sean Bean's Renewed Gangster Series Deserves To Be As Big As Peaky Blinders

While Netflix’s Peaky Blinders might be one of the best mobster shows ever made, Sean Bean’s 2025 gangster drama is still a worthy follow-up to the historical crime epic. Every gangster movie and show is faced with a major question at the very earliest stages of its production. The story can either be set in the current day or the past, and both of these options inevitably color how the audience views its gangster antiheroes.

Set a mob story in the past, as The Godfather movies did, and viewers are predisposed to romanticize its characters. They might be ruthless gangsters, but they are operating in an unfamiliar world where social and cultural norms are different, so viewers are more likely to cut them further slack. This explains why Boardwalk Empire’s main characters often seem more morally ambiguous than, for example, the thuggish mobsters of The Sopranos, even though both shows focus on murderous career criminals.

The choice to set a crime drama in the past can also allow the show to glamorize the era itself, especially in contrast with gritty, urban present-day crime dramas. One example of this comes in the comparison between MobLand and Peaky Blinders. Netflix’s critically acclaimed Peaky Blinders takes place in post-World War I Birmingham, whereas Guy Ritchie’s 2025 hit MobLand is set in contemporary London. MobLand feels harsher and darker as a result, as does its BBC competitor, This City Is Ours.

This City Is Ours Is The Best British Crime Series Since Peaky Blinders

Starring Sean Bean as Ronnie Phelan, a mob boss who unintentionally plunges his city’s criminal underworld into disarray when he announces his intention to retire, This City Is Ours has a lot in common with MobLand on the surface. Ritchie’s MobLand focuses on Tom Hardy’s fixer Harry Da Souza, a longtime loyal employee of the Harrigan crime dynasty, while This City Is Ours focuses on Ronnie’s fixer Michael Kavanagh.

However, there are a few vital differences between the two shows. James Nelson-Joyce’s Michael is more sympathetic than Harry, as he desperately hopes to go legitimate but also needs his income to support his family. Where MobLand’s Harry can be a taciturn killer, Michael is a seemingly sweet man whose propensity for violence and unflinching ability to run a criminal enterprise nonetheless make him indispensable to a very dangerous local mob.

This moral ambiguity helps make This City Is Ours one of the best British crime dramas since Netflix’s Peaky Blinders ended with the spinoff movie Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man earlier in 2026. Like the story of Tommy Shelby’s attempts to turn the titular Birmingham street gang into a formidable force, This City Is Ours finds the humanity in its characters despite their crimes. Of course, this is a tougher trick to pull off in the show’s contemporary setting.

This City Is Ours Perfects The Modern Gangster Series

Even though Peaky Blinders never ignored the immiseration suffered by the working class during its setting between the World Wars, the show did still benefit from a sense of overarching historical nostalgia. In contrast, the present-day story of This City Is Ours makes the show feel grittier, more immediate, and more intense, while its pervasive poignancy makes the series more emotionally engaging than the glossier MobLand.

If there was any perfect point of comparison for the show, it would be the iconic cop drama The Shield, an unbelievably brutal and intense thriller that left viewers enraptured by the story of some of the dirtiest cops ever seen onscreen. While the protagonists of The Shield were monsters, they were also consistently compelling.

In much the same way, it is hard for viewers to not get invested in the power struggles between Ronnie, his son Jamie, and his fixer Michael throughout this BBC show. Even more so than Peaky Blinders, This City Is Ours never sugarcoats the bloody, brutal reality of mob life, but this only makes the crime drama more compelling.