Everybody's fighting dirty in the A Thousand Blows trailer

Steven Knight's latest series is another power struggle in the criminal underground of working class England.

By Mary Kate Carr | January 16, 2025 | 10:52am

Screenshot: Hulu/YouTube

TV News A Thousand Blows

Everybody's fighting dirty in the A Thousand Blows trailer

Introducing Endless Mode: A New Games & Anime Site from Paste

Read our announcement | See the 10 Best Games of 2025 (So Far)

It’s not a Steven Knight joint if it’s not a period piece exploring the scrappiness and violence of working class life in the United Kingdom. Those who dig Knight’s previous television work (or at least Peaky Blinders) are sure to enjoy his next endeavor. The A Thousand Blows trailer features familiar rhythms, the political dealmaking of the criminal underground, the explosive showdowns between underdogs and their powerful rivals. Premiering February 21 on Hulu, the series “is set in the perilous world of illegal boxing in 1880s Victorian London and based on little explored real-life characters with incredible stories.”

As previously teased, the show is about three characters locked “in a defiant fight to survive.” Hezekiah Moscow (Malachi Kirby) has just come to England from Jamaica, and his best friend Alec Munroe (Francis Lovehall) sets out to train him to become a boxing champion. Hezekiah quickly becomes involved—in both business and pleasure—with Mary Carr (Erin Doherty), leader of the Forty Elephants, “the biggest gang of female thieves in the whole of London,” as she introduces herself in the A Thousand Blows trailer. Mary is already entangled with Sugar Goodson (Stephen Graham), the “self-declared emperor of the East End boxing world.” Goodson has extended Mary some degree of protection, but she’s undermining Goodson by allying with Hezekiah. Hezekiah is ready to fight his way to the top, but Goodson wants to beat him down. It’s a complicated power struggle, or as the Hulu synopsis puts it, “a battle of the old world against the new.”