Gangs of London

Gangs of London is what happens when the director of The Raid gets a TV budget and decides to skip the fat. Brutal, operatic, gorgeously shot. And absolutely unbothered by the gentler conventions of British crime drama. If you came for tea and tension, you're in the wrong taxi.

🎬 Premise

Created by Gareth Evans and Matt Flannery for Sky Atlantic in 2020, Gangs of London is set in a contemporary version of London that looks a lot like the one on the map, except it's quietly run by a coalition of crime factions (Welsh, Albanian, Pakistani, Nigerian, Kurdish, Danish) who have stopped competing openly and are dividing the city between them. Their fragile peace is held together by one man: Finn Wallace, the Irish-Welsh kingpin who has brokered every deal that matters.

When Finn is killed in the first episode, the vacuum at the top of the hierarchy detonates everything. His son Sean takes the throne angry and unprepared. A mysterious newcomer, Elliot Finch, begins climbing through the Wallace organisation for reasons of his own. The gangs themselves start tearing at the seams of the city, some for love, some for profit, most out of sheer reflex.

What starts as a who-dunnit becomes a war story, and then something bigger: a study of how global capital, not men with guns, really runs modern London.

🎭 Cast

• Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù as Elliot Finch, the series' haunted, athletically terrifying centre of gravity. A performance that announced Dirisu as one of the most watchable leading men working in the UK
• Joe Cole as Sean Wallace, trying to fill his father's shoes while barely holding himself together
• Colm Meaney as Finn Wallace, the patriarch whose death reshapes the map
• Michelle Fairley as Marian Wallace, Finn's widow and the most strategically dangerous person in the family
• Lucian Msamati as Ed Dumani, the Wallaces' oldest ally and a man whose loyalties are never simple
• Paapa Essiedu as Alex Dumani, Ed's Oxford-educated son, caught between cultures and legacies
• Narges Rashidi as Lale, a Kurdish freedom-fighter turned drug-runner funding a cause back home
• Brian Vernel as Billy Wallace, the fragile younger Wallace brother whose unraveling is the show's emotional spine
• Orli Shuka as Luan Dushaj, the Albanian faction's patriarch and one of the show's most magnetic supporting turns

🎨 Style & Atmosphere

Gareth Evans is best known for the Indonesian martial-arts masterpiece , and he brings that same obsession with physical craft to television. The action set pieces in are, frankly, in their own category. Hand-to-hand fights are staged with the clarity and choreography of dance, shot in long, confident takes that let you see the hit landing. If you've read any think-piece about action choreography on TV in the last five years, is almost certainly somewhere in the citations.