Tell Dooshane, Bring Me My Lauryn: The Unique Success of Top Boy
What do you get when you mix two rappers, an Irishman and… *checks notes* Drake?!
Top Boy is a very special show.
This fact has become clearer and clearer to me since I started watching the Netflix revival in 2019, despite the fact that I’d consciously avoided the show upon its original 2-season run in 2011.
When 15/16-year-old me heard the premise of Top Boy 12 years ago, it sounded like exactly the kind of show that I would want to avoid for a few reasons. The grittiest show I’d felt comfortable watching up to that point had been Misfits (before Robert Sheehan left obviously); I generally avoided series that I knew would be violent or too bleak, mainly choosing to stick to my comfort zone of sitcoms and British sci-fi adventure; and — most embarrassingly — my political evolution at that point was at this kind of Centrist-ish, respectability stage where I believed that we could fix things if everyone would just stop yelling (although how Centrist could you really be when the 2012 Olympics hadn’t happened yet? Idk maybe one to ask James O’Brien) and that the mere existence of Black people in shows about drugs and gangs was a key obstacle to our liberation.
It’s a stage where you find yourself saying reductive sh*t like “ Black people are the architects of our own downfall, how can we expect to be taken seriously if we don’t take ourselves seriously?? “ Even now we’ll often see it pushed by Black conservative grifters on GB News, y’know, when they’re not talking about why racism is fake/over, how Jeremy Corbyn wants to persecute them by legally mandating the use of lip balm, and why the real racists aren’t the people who proudly lynch g*lliw*g dolls in pubs, it’s the people who tell them to maybe not lynch g*lliw*g dolls in pubs.
I was more like a young David Lammy, but much, much less English.
It was so easy for the younger me to buy into it because I hadn’t yet developed an awareness of how systemic failures/biases affected behaviour, and I’d bought into this dumb and bad-faith idea that anyone who spoke on these systemic failures were ignoring personal responsibility as if the two ideas were mutually exclusive.
Anyway, the reason I bring it up is that it was 8 years later when I’d long since moved on from this flawed ideology (and when my career in media had given me a greater understanding of how racism can play into what TV shows get commissioned) that I saw some news. It appeared that Drake had taken a break from writing diss tracks aimed at some cute cashier who’d dared to tell other men to “have a nice day”, and decided to lend his voice to a successful campaign to bring a new series of Top Boy to Netflix.
And it was upon watching the show in its new home that I finally learned the truth…
Top Boy is a show about drugs and gangs.
But it’d be a mistake to think that’s all there is to it.
So, what is it that makes Top Boy so special?
We should start by asking a few questions:
How many British shows do you know that made it to five seasons with little decline in quality?
How many managed to reinvent themselves and adapt themselves to a very different climate successfully?
How many navigated the divide between traditional TV and streaming, becoming a transatlantic hit in the process?
How many managed to do all of this while being brave enough to platform and nurture underrepresented talent both onscreen and off?
The answer to all of those questions is: not many.
I mean damn, look at what happened to Black Mirror.
It’s important to preface all of this by saying: is Top Boy a perfect show? Hell no. While some perfect projects do exist (like Spider-Man 2 or Rye Lane, which you should watch), Top Boy certainly has its flaws, weaknesses, and places where it drops the ball in terms of frustrating narrative choices, character inconsistencies, blind spots in certain areas of representation, and slightly iffy acting performances from the less experienced members of the cast (including one newer addition who is probably the best rapper of their generation, but slightly takes you out of the show with their performance, not all of them can be a Kano I guess). I might choose to write about those issues later, but in this instance, it’s more important to give the show its flowers in the way I believe it deserves and doesn’t get enough.
When praising Top Boy, it’s both easy and correct to highlight how much of a triumph it is in terms of representation. After all, creator Ronan Bennett made a conscious effort to discover hidden tales found among the marginalized and villainized people affected by the ghost of Blair and an increasingly conservative society, hearing and telling the stories of young offenders, “anti-social youths” and working-class people in East London in the process. There’s no clearer example of the intellectual curiosity that runs through the fabric of this show than its origins, with Irish-born creator Ronan Bennett being inspired to create Top Boy after witnessing a 12-year-old deal drugs outside of a Tesco in Hackney and deciding to interview him and other drug dealers with the help of his friend and prominent community figure, Gerry Jackson (you can find two great Bennett’s interviews here.
It’s also impossible to talk about Top Boy without discussing how the show has put endless trust into the acting talents of young, black rappers — the perceived enemies of late 2000s/early-2010s civil society — like Asher D, Kano, Dave, Little Simz, Stanaman’s cousin Bashy, Nolay, and Scorcher. The show even worked with Netflix to start a mentorship scheme in production departments such as lighting, make-up, camera, hair, and directing for creatives from underrepresented communities (with mentees going on to have major credits in the show itself).
Sure, it’s important to big up Top Boy’s accomplishments in representation, but it’s equally, if not more important, to acknowledge just how successful the show manages to be in the context of the wider British television industry. When (largely white) media outlets *solely* talk about shows like Top Boy through the lens of their diversity and proximity to Blackness, they often over-simplify the qualities of the show and, perhaps without realizing, fail to acknowledge how it stands on its own two feet as an intricately-crafted, well-written and thematically-rich piece of visual art. Quite frankly, Top Boy as a show has more than earned the right to stand above television shows that have enjoyed much more money, more trust from the largely white British television industry, and more star power (although eagle-eyed viewers can go back to the original series and spot future stars like Michaela Coel, Benedict Wong, Nicholas Pinnock, Jo Martin, Letitia Wright, and Clare-Hope Ashitey) and that is something to be celebrated.
If you’re looking for what lies behind Top Boy’s unique appeal, there are many factors that we can look at. The show caught lightning in a bottle when it cast Ashley Walters and Kane “Kano” Robinson as its two leads (Kano, in particular, had minimal prior acting experience but has evolved into one of the best performers in the show and a husband to many), Robinson and Walters delivered brilliant performances, adapting with the show expertly as their characters grew and the world changed around them. The two would go on to become producers of the show and were key to ushering in a whole new generation of talents like Jasmine Jobson and Michael Ward.
Another feather in Top Boy’s cap is how the show uses the narrative art of perspective, especially in its earlier seasons. While Sully and Dushane are the two protagonists of the show, almost every season has a third, younger protagonist, usually with their own narrative that is destined to be intertwined with the two other leads. In the first two seasons, a lot of this focus falls on Ra’Nell Smith (Malcolm Kamulete), a 14-year-old kid who largely tries to keep out of trouble but seems to find it all around him. In season 3 (the first Netflix season) we follow fan-favorite Jamie Tovell (Ward) who, after both of his parents pass away and leave him as the primary carer for his brothers (similar to Bennett’s experience during the show’s hiatus as his wife passed and he had to care for his children without her), decides to speed-run his way to the top, butting heads with Dushane and Sully in the process. Our tertiary leads help us to explore the finer themes, quirks, and injustices of the Top Boy world while also giving us a vitally different perspective of Dushane and Sully. If you want to see just how much Dushane and Sully have changed, perceive them through the eyes of Ra’Nell and then the eyes of Jamie.
In general, Top Boy’s character-writing is a huge part of its appeal, there’s a small quirk I constantly point out when discussing Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies, where many of the characters that you see, even the less prevalent parts of the ensemble, have a certain something else to them. In the world of Top Boy, there is often more to the characters that we see on screen, some vulnerability, sense of duty, or insecurity that hints at another world within each character, a deeper layer of why they’re doing what they’re doing.
Jaq (Jobson) and Dris (played by Shone Romulus) are perfect examples, these are two characters who play supporting roles to Dushane and Sully but are distinctly their own people. Both have their own wants, needs, and motivations that are treated with the necessary weight to make them feel like active participants in this world. When we discover that Dris has betrayed our two leads despite having been with them (and us) since the very first scene of the show, we are able to both sympathize with his reasons and feel the full force of the consequences when Sully is forced to kill him (his fate is left slightly ambiguous until we find out that Sully shot him a lot). In the most recent series, we follow Jaq as she faces her own problems, trying to have a successful romantic relationship, coming to terms with a homophobic assault in her own Jaq way, and then having to bail her sister out of trouble again (the Liverpool storyline is kinda meh, but I still find myself saying “ Tell Dooshane, bring me my Lauryn” constantly so big up Howard Charles anyway). Both of these characters are given room to be themselves, and this serves to not only flesh out the world of Top Boy but also to reinforce the show’s themes.
And speaking of themes, Top Boy manages to be so thematically rich that any attempts to pigeonhole it feel wholly over-simplistic. Top Boy explores themes of morality, family, community, identity, class, poverty, race, gentrification, art, abuse, love, adolescence, mental health, physical health, addiction, grief and so much more.
My personal favourite theme to analyze is the constant tension between the need to survive and the desire to thrive, encapsulated perfectly in how Sully’s constant anxiety around survival clashes with Dushane’s insatiable ambition to thrive and enjoy the finer things in life (if you want to understand why Sully goes against Dushane in the way that he does in the final scene of the most recent season, look at it through that thematic lens). Sully sums his thematic ideology up best in the chilling teaser for the upcoming final season when he says:
“If we are not monsters, we’re food… And I could never be food.”
This is the kind of writing that really understands its characters and understands the themes for which they serve as vessels, there’s a real clarity and assuredness that permeates through the show, and this allows multiple kinds of people to take multiple things from it. It’s also writing that displays an understanding of tonal sensitivity and when to avoid taking itself too seriously, often using humour to reinforce the humanity, closeness, and even inexperience of its characters while being able to display the gravity of their acts of brutality without needing to descend into gleeful gore.
As a crime series, Top Boy will, of course, display its fair share of violence and death, but the approach to this isn’t simply to revel in it or to use gratuitous violence simply for shock value and to understand a big part of the show’s appeal, we can quickly consider how masterfully it deals with this in its first season. In the early episodes of Top Boy especially, the majority of deaths are treated with a thick layer of tragedy, the show mourns both the death of the often younger, working-class victims, as well as the death of a small part of the killer’s soul. One of the most important arcs in the show comes in its very first season, where Sully and Dushane (neither of whom even carry guns, to begin with) slowly come to realize that killing will become a necessary step in their survival/rise to the top. If you find yourself rewatching the most recent season, contrast the actions of our two leads (Sully murdering Jamie in cold blood, Dushane demanding that Jamie murders his best friend in a twisted mirror of the same test the former was given by his previous supplier Bobby Raikes) with their reactions to their very first kills early in the show.
(*I wrote a whole section here analyzing the development of Sully and Dushane’s attitudes to murder in the first season, I was going to include it but it was a bit too long for this section, but also not long enough to justify its own piece because I would then be tempted to analyze the whole show, so I’ve tacked it on at the end for those who want to read it.)
This is all to say that even something as common to the crime genre as death has so much more weight in the multi-layered world of Top Boy where we see victims range from rival goons to innocent family members, to pillars of the community like Ra’Nell’s father figure Leon, and even small children who get caught up in the game too early.
The world of Top Boy is one that feels alive with its own code of honour, it’s one that feels like it’s constantly moving and developing even when audiences aren’t watching, it’s a world that feels intensely familiar but also somehow larger-than-life and it’s the latter that helps it to provide commentary on so many issues facing underrepresented communities in real Britain. The show openly embraces Black British voices, talent, culture, and music in ways that feel like the writer is truly keen to work with his cast and crew to deliver an experience that feels true to them.
Truly what makes Top Boy so special, what has allowed it to survive and thrive in a way very few British shows have been able to, is the fact that at its core, Top Boy is a show that lives off of multi-generational cooperation, empathy, as well as intellectual flexibility and curiosity. It’s about looking at the depths of British society that have been ignored for far too long, and it’s about approaching those who are rejected by the establishment with an open mind and a desire to be understanding.
Ronan Bennett could have easily written a show based entirely on his own assumptions and prejudices surrounding drug dealers, he could’ve paid money to get a team of boffins to do some research into “the ghetto” and write a show about that, but instead, Bennett made the choice to really listen to the people who felt that they had no voice. He took time to truly try to understand, and when he found his own perspective wanting, he asked for the help of people like his friend, Gerry Jackson, a fitness trainer and pillar who used his status as a pillar in his community to help Bennett talk to real people and ensured that they could trust their impending representation (Gerry went on to be a script consultant on the show and the basis for a character in season 1).
The true magic at the very core of Top Boy lies in the fact that it’s not just the work of one man, it’s a show that has only been able to live up to its full potential because it invested and had faith in so many who needed a chance, and those people pulled together to create something beautiful.
Kind of like the 2012 London Olympic Ga-
Nah I’m kidding.
*At first, Sully and Dushane baulk at the idea of taking a life (they don’t even own guns), the first spot of blood on their hands comes when Sully accidentally kills someone who had done nothing to them and both characters are initially alarmed by what they have done. The next episode is dedicated almost entirely to the consequences of crossing this line, as we see their victim’s family mourn them and both Sully and Dushane grapple with the role that death must play in their survival and ambitions. It’s telling that both characters visit their own families with Dushane going to church with his mum and visiting his brother, while Sully visits his daughter in an episode (and season) that acts almost as an epilogue for the last echoes of their innocence. By the end of the 45-minutes their body count now includes their rival Kamale (Dris pulls the trigger under the goading of Sully as Dushane looks away and flinches at the sound of the gunshot) and their traitorous superior Lee (again with Sully declining to do it himself, urging Dushane to do it before nudging him and causing Dushane to pull the trigger accidentally).
Each murder committed by our leads in that first season has a specific purpose and intentionality behind it, showing the type of men they’re developing into as the weight of each life lost slowly becomes lighter and lighter. This culminates in the final episode, where Sully’s brashness and over-eagerness causes him to kill Ra’Nell’s father figure Leon, and Dushane is tasked by their supplier with killing Sully who is now deemed a liability, but instead responds by murdering the supplier in cold blood (Dushane gives the same test of loyalty to Jamie years later, but Jamie tellingly responds differently) and coldly taking the position of top boy for himself. Just when you think they’ve gotten away with it, the previously peaceful Ra’Nell responds to the death of Leon by trying to stab Dushane in a vengeful rage, showing both how easy it is for anyone to be consumed in this cycle of crime and violence (interesting to note the Ra’Nell involves himself in the drug game on behalf of his pregnant white neighbour who largely gets off scott-free while Ra’Nell’s life is almost ruined) and shaking Dushane to the core as he sees a boy he’s actively tried to keep away from the life be driven to violence by the consequences of his and Sully’s influence.
Originally published at http://jjwi13.wordpress.com on June 13, 2023.
