Period dramas have a legacy problem. You can set your story in, say, New York in 1927, but if your show lasts more than two years, then you have to address the Wall-Street-sized elephant in the room. That’s why Downton Abbey, despite airing for six seasons and three movies, was ended for good before the series reached the thirties. Bridgerton found a way around it by hand-waving geopolitics away completely, even though the Napoleonic Wars were raging at the time.
Then, there’s Peaky Blinders. Steven Knight’s long-running crime thriller series has always embraced time passing in-universe as part of the show’s natural evolution. Season 1 followed crime lord Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy) as he built up a syndicate after returning from the trenches of WWI, and by the end of Season 6, the series had reached the late 1920s — and yes, it did address the 1929 stock market crash.
