I’m about the same age as Dushane and Sully, the fictional protagonists of London gangster epic Top Boy, and I also grew up on a Hackney council estate a bit like their Summerhouse drug-dealing dominion. So it seems possible that, in some TV-merged alternate reality, we might have played out together as kids. Long summer days of knock-down ginger and cussing matches in the stairwells, until your mum calls you home for dinner.
I grew up, moved away and got on with life, but Dushane and Sully never did. They stayed behind, inextricably tied to the estate: a home, and also a kind of hell. That can happen when you’re surrounded by looming high-rises that shrink your horizons. For all their outward swagger, Dushane (played by Ashley Walters) and Sully (Kane “Kano” Robinson) are grown men who aspire only to be the “boy”. For all they hustle and hard-scrabble their way to riches and respect, it’s only ever a matter of time before they’re laid low again.
This is the classic bind of the movie gangster, isn’t it? “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.” Or, in Dushane’s words: “Ever since we were kids, bruv … tryin’ to get to the top. What for?” And Top Boy is a gangster story to rank alongside the classics. What’s remarkable, though, is how, over its 12 years and four series – a fifth and final one is released on Netflix on Thursday – the show has pushed back against those closing horizons and narrow stereotypes, steadily expanding our outlook beyond the limits of the urban thriller and the emotional stasis of its two main characters.
The show first aired on Channel 4 in 2011, three months after the London riots and at the tail-end of a boom in yoofsploitation flicks such as Kidulthood and Bullet Boy (Walters’ breakthrough role) . These films drew on British cinema’s social realist tradition, but their smartest move was to piggyback on the emergent grime scene by casting charismatic young rappers in key roles.
Top Boy did that too, but with heart and authenticity that was rooted in another Hackney-born friendship – between Top Boy’s Northern Irish writer-creator Ronan Bennett and his fitness trainer turned script consultant, Gerry Jackson. “When you’re working one to one, you talk about lots of different things,” said Jackson when I interviewed the pair last year. “And this subject came up about the streets. Ronan said, ‘You’ve got a lot of stories there, Gerry,’ and we kind of went from there.”
The result was a gripping, morally complex show which warranted serious attention from the off. Kehinde Andrews, the UK’s first professor of Black Studies, wrote about the show in the context of the “iconic ghetto”, a term coined by Black American sociologist Elijah Anderson to describe how “the ascription of ‘ghetto’ to anonymous Blacks, has burdened Blacks with a negative presumption they must disprove.” In other words, you can take the boy out of the estate, but racism and classism make it harder to take the estate out of the boy. Dushane discovered that in series three, when he moved into an airy, open-plan apartment and starting shelling out £5 for artisan coffees.
From the beginning, too, Top Boy overflowed with powerhouse performances, not least from Robinson, whose long-assured ascension to bona fide movie star comes this autumn with the lead in Daniel Kaluuya’s screenwriting feature debut The Kitchen. The likes of Michaela Coel, Micheal Ward, Letitia Wright and Mercury prize-winning rapper Dave have all passed through en route to bigger things, and Bennett is now in the position of turning down cameo offers from huge Hollywood stars because it simply isn’t credible that Samuel L Jackson, say, would turn up in a Clapton caff to talk “Ps” over fried egg sandwiches and Lucozade.
Celebrity superfans can be useful in other ways, though. If you’ve heard Drake’s verse on J Hus’s hit-of-the-summer Who Told You and wondered how a Canadian lover-boy learned to chat like a Hackney badman, the answer is almost definitely by watching Top Boy on YouTube. After the show’s premature cancellation in 2013, it was Drake, in collaboration with Netflix, who facilitated its 2019 revival.
By then, unlike its maturity-challenged protagonists, Top Boy had grown up. Some of this maturation was stylistic. Series three and four added world-class directors to its roster, including Oscar-winner Reinaldo Marcus Green. But it was more than that. In early series the women were thinly characterised and always sexually available. (Letitia Wright told me in 2020 that she had reluctantly quit after series one to seek out more developed character arcs: “I love everybody who gave me an opportunity on that show … [but] I just got consumed with this purpose to show Black girls in a different light.”). The 2019 third series – the first for Netflix – addressed this by introducing diverse and significant female characters, including Simbiatu “Little Simz” Ajikawo as single parent and aspiring business owner Shelley, and Jaq (Jasmine Jobson), a coolly efficient enforcer who rises through the ranks of Dushane’s drugs operation. Through these characters the show has explored coercive control and homophobic violence, issues unknown to the trad urban thriller of the noughties.
So there’s much to mourn and much to celebrate when the show ducks out for good this week. Black British culture is no longer nipping at the heels of glamorous American cousins, but is in the ascendant, with proven international appeal. Funny to think that a show once accused of perpetuating stereotypes has ended up opening the door to Black British screen representation of all kinds; from irresistible romcom Rye Lane to ITV’s period gothic thriller The Confessions of Frannie Langton, and the BBC’s musical family drama Champion (starring erstwhile Top Boy younger Malcolm Kamulete).
As for Dushane and Sully, I’m already bereft at the loss of TV frenemies I’ve known – if not actually since our shared childhood on the estate, then at least for a stretch of our mutually formative years. That hurts.
Top talent
Netflix’s London-set drama hasn’t merely spent over a decade showcasing the undertold stories of life in the capital’s estates, it’s also featured a roster of incredible acting and musical talent along the way. From Hollywood action heroes to the writer of one of the decade’s landmark dramas, here are some of the stars who’ve taken roles in Top Boy.
Letitia Wright
She may be best known as tech-savvy action hero Shuri, from the MCU’s Black Panther franchise, but the Hollywood star’s first major screen role involved slightly more hiding of street drugs behind her teeth to avoid “feds”. Even as an 18-year-old, her performance had such heart and soul that it leapt off the screen, with her fledgling romance with fellow teen Gem providing the most tender moments of season one – until she left to pursue more empowering female roles.
Micheal Ward
His Top Boy debut landed at the same time as his star turn in headline-generatingly controversial movie Blue Story, but the Netflix series truly showcased his devastatingly versatile acting range: from warmly paternal to icily brutal, via moist-eyed trauma victim. He’s gone on to work with Sharon Stone, Steve McQueen on Small Axe and Olivia Colman in Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light. With upcoming projects including roles in King Richard director Reinaldo Marcus Green’ Bob Marley biopic, his star shows no sign of dimming.
Dave
Six days before the Streatham MC won the Mercury music prize for his debut studio album, Psychodrama, he announced himself to the nation as terrifying gangster Modie. So convincing was his chillingly brutal, astonishingly maniacal performance that even his amazed co-stars have spoken about finding it hard to reconcile with his real-life persona as a canny introspective, creator of borderline sociological grime-cum-drill.
Michaela Coel
The I May Destroy You star’s big TV break came as wrongly accused murder suspect Kayla. The grief-fuelled rage she poured into the role of a bereaved woman charged with killing her own boyfriend was an early sign of her visceral acting power – even if you couldn’t yet tell she’d go on to create one of the 20th century’s most astonishing dramas.
Little Simz
By the time she appeared as the love interest to Ashley Walter’s DuShane, she was an Ivor Novello-winning MC who’d paused a promising acting career as a CBBC child star and in E4 youth drama Youngers. Her soulful, vulnerable turn soon skyrocketed her career, landing her a cameo in the Venom movie and a part in Prime Video drama The Power, which she complimented by bagging a Mercury Prize win for fourth album, Sometimes I Might Be Introvert.
