Taboo

On the surface Taboo is a revenge thriller. Delaney is back and people who wronged him, wronged his mother, and wronged his family are going to pay. Underneath that, it is a study of the British Empire as a machine that ate people. The East India Company on this show is not a wallpaper villain. It is the real enemy. A private corporation that ran its own army, wrote its own laws, and acted as the de facto British state across a third of the world.

Delaney is the empire's product and its indictment. Africa did things to him. Africa let him do things. The trauma he carries back to London is inseparable from the cargo that came with him, and the show is honest about what that cargo was and how the money was made. It does not flinch.

The other big theme is blood. Bloodline. Blood feud. And the incest storyline between Delaney and Zilpha, which the show treats with a weight and ambiguity that will put some viewers off the whole thing. That is a fair reaction. The show knows what it is asking you to sit with.

🎨 Style & Atmosphere

Kristoffer Nyholm, Anders Engström, and the show's directors shoot 1814 London as a place where the river and the fog and the mud are all characters in the story. Gas lamps and tallow candles. Ships at anchor in the Thames. Rookeries that feel like they smell. The production design team built Delaney's father's warehouse, Strange's boardroom, and the Prince Regent's gilded rooms, and shot them all under the same heavy, brown, smoke-stained light.

The sound design is a separate reason to watch. Low drums under scenes of men walking through alleyways with bad intent. Moroccan string layered over it. Max Richter's score binding the whole thing together. Delaney's ritual whisper is one of those pieces of TV sound design you remember years later.

Taboo is one of the very few prestige dramas that understands the British Empire as horror rather than heritage.

📈 Reception & Legacy

Critics were split. Some called it gorgeous and overwrought in equal measure. Some, notably in the British broadsheets, hated the pacing of the middle episodes. The audience felt differently. It pulled the biggest BBC One drama launch of that year and built a devoted cult on the strength of Hardy's performance and the atmosphere.

Season two has been promised for years and years. Hardy and Knight have said repeatedly that it is coming. As of 2024 it is confirmed in pre-production. Whether it actually lands is still a question. The delay has become a meme.

I think the closest match on the site for Taboo is Peaky Blinders, another Steven Knight joint with the same grease and period menace, and Hardy pops up in that one too. The gang politics of Gangs of London and Hardy's more recent outing in MobLand share the same brutal tone. Fans of the cold, blackened period work of The Terror or the naval scheming of Black Sails will find a lot to recognise.

🏆 Why It Works

I am a sucker for Tom Hardy doing his incomprehensible Tom Hardy thing, and Taboo is the purest distillation of the brand. Growled threats and a long coat and glances that last three beats too long. A man who walks into a room and rearranges it.

But the reason the show has kept its cult is that underneath the surface pleasure there is a real piece of writing. Knight is interested in the moral ugliness of the early nineteenth century and he does not let anyone off the hook. Not the state. Not the Company. Not the protagonist. It is a show where every powerful man is rotten and the question is only which kind of rot you prefer.

Eight episodes, no filler, one of the best single-season British dramas of the last fifteen years, and maybe the best thing Hardy has done on television. Whether season two ever comes or not, the original run is worth your time.

Oona Chaplin

Zilpha Geary