In Its Final Season, Netflix’s Top Boy Is Still the Best Crime Show You’ve Never Seen

Everybody has a show like this—the one you tell all your friends about, but almost nobody listens. I’ve been the one who politely nods plenty of times, but when it comes to Top Boy, the British crime drama whose fifth* and final season airs on Netflix starting this Thursday, I’m the one who won’t shut up. My previous attempts to write it up on this site have included headlines phrases like “deserves more attention” and “far more than just the British Wire.” I have frankly done about all I can do, and have probably long-passed the threshold between “passionate fan” and “annoying.” And yet, here I am again.

(*Top Boy has had an interesting history, with two short series running in 2011 and 2013 before it went away for six full years, only for a group that included the rapper Drake to revive it, leading to three more series in 2019, 2022, and now. So while this is the fifth season by my reckoning, Netflix calls it the third season and labels the first two seasons as a different program called Top Boy: Summerhouse. My obvious recommendation is to start in 2011, with the latter series, if you’re coming in fresh.)

There is so much to say about Top Boy, from its incredible Caribbean-infused British street patois to its complex, flawed characters, to its excellent plotting to its well cultivated rap soundtrack (that sounds a million times more interesting and socially conscious to my untrained ears than anything I’ve ever heard on the radio) to, perhaps above all, its keen sense of the small tragedies of modern poverty. (The show is set in the high rises of London, with a predominantly Black and poor population, where the only time the government seems to pay attention to the citizens is when they want to deport or gentrify them.) It’s the kind of story where you come for the ongoing Shakespearean saga of Sully (Kane Robinson) and DuShane (Ashley Walters), kingpins who are best friends and worst enemies at once, and you stay because it has a thousand and one ways to break your heart—many of them involving children who are too young to be thrust into the cruelty of this particular world, but have very little choice in the matter.

The show was conceived and written by Ronan Bennett, an Irish writer who spent time in prison in his youth on charges related to the Irish Republican Army, and was inspired to create Top Boy when he saw a 12-year-old dealing drugs at his local grocery store. Unlike The Wire, Top Boy focuses predominantly on the dealers and users, with the police making cameo appearances at most. It can be fast-paced and brutal, but it can also be meditative, and it maintains a sense of exuberance and hope without ever shying away from the element of despair surrounding its principal characters and their environment.