Peaky Blinders Meets The Gentlemen In Unmissable 5-Part Crime Drama On Prime Video

Although Prime Video’s Irish crime drama mixes Peaky Blinders with The Gentlemen, the gritty series also has a dark and unpredictable appeal all of its own. While The Sopranos played a huge role in popularizing gangster shows, the iconic HBO crime drama was only part of the genre’s evolution. Around the same time, both The Wire and the corrupt cop drama The Shield made gangster shows more grounded and morally complex than ever before.

After decades of traditional cop shows portraying heroic cops pursuing unambiguously villainous criminals, innovative hits like NYPD Blue and Homicide: Life on the Streets offered a more morally complex vision of street crime. The Wire and The Shield expanded on this, while movies like 2002’s City of God and MobLand creator Guy Ritchie’s early hits Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch proved that gangster stories weren’t geographically limited to the United States.

Within this context, it is no surprise that a flurry of international gangster shows cropped up during the 2010s. Some, like 2014’s Gomorrah, were classics of the genre, but one was unique in helping shape both Peaky Blinders and The Gentlemen, even though this series is now less well known than both later Netflix hits. The show was Love/Hate, a five-season Irish hit that deserves to be sought out by all fans of the gangster genre.

Love/Hate Is An All-Time Great Irish Crime Drama

With an astounding cast including Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, Ruth Negga, Robert Sheehan, Aidan Gillen, Peter Coonan, and Barry Keoghan, Love/Hate would alwasy have been a must-watch based on its lineup alone. However, the RTE show was more than a who’s who of notable Irish actors. Filmed on location in Dublin, Love/Hate was an immersive look at the city’s criminal underworld that focused on Sheehan’s small-time crook Darren and Vaughan-Lawlor’s conflicted career criminal Nidge.

Early on in the show’s five-year run, Love/Hate divided Irish critics who questioned the authenticity of its accents and the show’s depiction of criminal life in Dublin. However, as the show continued, Love/Hate became an international sensation, with critics hailing its third season as a highlight worth of comparisons to The Wire. Compared to thelikes of MobLand and Tulsa King, it’s certainly fair to say that even Love/Hate’s wildest moments are far more grounded than many contemporary crime dramas.

In fact, a major part of the show’s appeal comes from Love/Hate’s function as a proverbial time capsule for a certain era of TV crime drama. Created in the wake of The Wire and The Shield’s success, Love/Hate is a dark, tonally heavy, and often unremittingly bleak show where fan-favorite characters die unceremoniously with little fan fare and crime is a messy, unpleasant business that rarely looks slick, cool, or glamorous.

Love/Hate Could Not Be Less Like Barry Keoghan’s Other Irish Crime Epic

In this regard, it is more than a little ironic that Netflix’s Peaky Blinders spinoff movie The Immortal Man gave Saltburn star Barry Keoghan one of his biggest roles to date, considering his early part in Love/Hate. Keoghan played a young criminal in season 4 of the series, but Love/Hate could not have less in common with Peaky Blinders if the show actively tried.

Where Peaky Blinders was a glamorous period drama, Love/Hate is a gritty and deeply tragic contemporary thriller. Much like Boardwalk Empire was romantic and lush, despite its tragic moments, compared to the mundane realism of The Wire, Love/Hate was unapologetically committed to capturing the grim everyday reality of life as a criminal in Dublin.

Peaky Blinders shared its epic, operatic style with The Godfather movies, with stylized costumes, choreographed fight sequences, slick slow-motion, and an anachronistic soundtrack populated with fashionable artists. In stark contrast, the gangsters of Love/Hate look gaudy and tired, their homes are squalid and sterile, and moments of violence are brutal, pointless, and often shockingly nasty. Two infamous viral scenes, the shooting of a cat and the fate of one character in prison, even earned record numbers of complaints to RTE for their graphic nature.

Love/Hate’s Guy Ritchie Link Highlights Its Most Surprising Trait

Image courtesy of MoviesStillsDb

Since the kitchen sink realism of Love/Hate made the show feel more like Nil By Mouth than Peaky Blinders, it might seem surprising that creator Stuart Carolan went on to direct episodes of Guy Ritchie’s acclaimed Netflix hit The Gentlemen. Both The Gentlemen and Love/Hate are critical hits that reviewers loved and both are technically mob dramas, but fair warning: Love/Hate is a lot darker.

As such, it may be tough to see the similarities between Ritchie’s goofy dark comedy, which is often compared to a live-action cartoon thanks to its outrageous violence, and Love/Hate’s bleak, unvarnished look at street crime. That said, a closer inspection reveals the unlikely tonal similarities between both works. Thanks to its reliance on realistic Irish dialect, Love/Hate has a consistent, if quiet, undercurrent of dark local humor running through its story.

Like The Sopranos before it, Love/Hate grounded its crime drama story in characters whose horrible actions didn’t stop them from being funny in a deadpan, unexpected way. The BBC’s later We Own This City later took a similar approach to the gangland figures of Liverpool, characters who were unexpectedly charismatic despite their crimes and whose easy humor ended up appearing in even the show’s most tense moments.

As Love/Hate continued and Nidge gradually emerged as the show’s true protagonist, the character’s moral arc began to resemble that of Tony Soprano, The Shield’s Vic Mackey, or Breaking Bad’s Walter White. Like those earlier TV antiheroes, Nidge began as a relatable, anxious, thoughtful man trying to do right by his family, and gradually turned this justification into an excuse for increasingly monstrous actions.

Much like Tony, Vic, and Walter, Nidge was also a character plagued by bad luck that often felt outright karmic. By the time the show’s final season reached its conclusion, Love/Hate had set up its antihero to reap everything he had sown throughout its five seasons. Thus, Love/Hate took the dark humor of The Gentlemen, eschewed the glamour of Peaky Blinders, and used its subtle irony to tell a gripping, uniquely Irish crime story.

Release Date

2010 – 2014-00-00

Network

RTÉ One

Directors

David Caffrey

Writers

Stuart Carolan

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  Aidan Gillen

  John Boy Power

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  Ruth Negga

  Rosemary “Rosie” Moynihan

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  killian scott

  Thomas “Tommy” Daly

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