Cillian Murphy’s 6-Part Crime Thriller Series Rewrote The Rules Of Historical Dramas

While Cillian Murphy’s Netflix hit Peaky Blinders might have wrapped up a few years before its movie spinoff The Immortal Man, the show had already reshaped its genre by the time of its original finale. The Peaky Blinders movie The Immortal Man proves that Netflix’s historical drama remains as popular as ever in 2026.

Predating Squid Game, Stranger Things, and even BoJack Horseman, Peaky Blinders was one of Netflix’s first major mainstream hits back in 2013, alongside Orange Is The New Black. A British crime drama set in Birmingham after the First World War, Peaky Blinders followed the titular street gang as they attempted to battle both rival mobs and the police.

Peaky Blinders Was Daringly Anachronistic For A Historical Drama

While the starry cast of Peaky Blinders was a big part of the show’s appeal, the series also deserves credit for a major innovation in the historical drama genre that elevated its success considerably. Unlike many earlier historical dramas, Peaky Blinders used anachronistic contemporary music to bring its characters into a more modern light.

Peaky Blinders and the many later historical dramas that borrowed from it, including creator Stephen Knight’s later hits Taboo and House of Guinness, deliberately used anachronistic elements like modern music cues to make the show’s story more propulsive, relatable, and urgent. With his script for 2006’s Amazing Grace, Knight proved he could pull off a straightforward historical drama.

However, Peaky Blinders was something else, as the show intentionally surprised viewers with anachronistic moments that jarred with what audiences expect from the genre. Since the series proved a success, this approach has become commonplace in historical dramas, from Elle Fanning’s Hulu series The Great to Apple TV’s loose, playful adaptation of Edith Wharton’s unfinished novel The Buccaneers.

Countless Later Historical Dramas Built On The Peaky Blinders Approach

Perhaps the most famous series to borrow this approach is Netflix’s own Bridgerton, which delights in using modern music to make its potentially stuffy setting feel more relatable to contemporary audiences. However, shows like Dickinson also borrowed from the Peaky Blinders playbook, proving that the intentional application of anachronism could work wonders across a variety of historical eras and subjects.

Admittedly, there is a limit to the success of the Peaky Blinders formula. Knight’s own adaptations of A Christmas Carol and Great Expectations, a pair of well-loved Charles Dickens books, earned the ire of critics for taking his edgy, anachronistic writing too far and turning these classics into gritty, almost comically grim thrillers that lacked the delicate tonal balance of his earlier hit, Peaky Blinders.