“We could’ve been anything that we wanted to be,” came the refrain in Alan Parker’s 1976 film Bugsy Malone, as four little boys, dressed as gangsters, strutted down the street. Perhaps, in the Seventies, the contrast of their youth and the implicit violence of the prohibition era could be easily played for laughs. But now, in 2023, as Netflix’s Top Boy returns for a six-part final series, the dreams and ambitions of young men, subsumed by needless violence, feels altogether more nightmarish.
The truce between Dushane (Ashley Walters) and Sully (Kane Robinson aka rapper Kano) has been the central relationship of Top Boy, even before it made the leap from Channel 4 to Netflix. Fragile at best, their cooperation has taken a serious blow: in the dying moments of the show’s penultimate series, Sully murdered his rival, Jamie (Micheal Ward), with whom Dushane had been doing business. And now Top Boy’s final season opens directly in the aftermath of that, as Dushane’s date with partner Shelley (Simbiatu Abisola Abiola aka rapper Little Simz) is interrupted by a text. “Jamie’s been dun,” it reads, succinctly.
