Relative to all that’s gone down before, things are calm when we return to Summerhouse for the new season of Top Boy. Jamie (Michael Ward), the young drug gang leader who spent most of the last season locked in a fraught battle for supremacy of the fictional east London estate, has just been released from prison. Dushane (Ashley Walters), the steely-eyed, long-time linchpin of the area — whose Machiavellian scheme put Jamie behind bars — is pleased with how the lack of local competition has led to both booming business and “not one murder in the ends” over the last six months. He even has plans to leave a life of crime behind, and “go legit” within a year.
It’s no spoiler to reveal that things don’t pan out like that; season four (or season two, if you’re counting from when Netflix rebooted it) is not a story about Dushane’s run for London Mayor. Top Boy has always been a show about the tangled web — crime, masculinity, poverty, violence, loyalty, power — and how, once you get caught up in it all, it’s more or less impossible to wriggle free. And so this new season goes, focusing on Dushane’s efforts to secure his empire while bringing multiple plot lines together in a gathering storm of fear and fury, pain and paranoia.
