Top Boy in context | BFI

The first episode of Top Boy, screened on 31 October 2011, opened to a familiar scenario: a young, impressionable Black boy is seen looking from the window of a high-rise flat as he observes an armed conflict between two local Black gangs, seemingly over drugs. As the fifth and final season begins on Netflix 12 years later, it’s worth reflecting on what audiences might have expected when original broadcaster Channel 4 first announced what it described as “an incredible four nights of drama”.

As explored in my new book Black Boys: The Social Aesthetics of British Urban Film, the arrival of Top Boy was an early example of what I’ve previously termed the ‘Black media event’, typified by a form of public service broadcasting drama – notable examples are Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You (2020), Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology (2020) and Adjani Salmon’s Dreaming Whilst Black (2021) – which draws its significance not just from the production’s ‘Blackness’ but also through its interaction with other Black cultural forms. 

The creation of a Black media event may or may not have been in the thinking of Ronan Bennett, the Irish writer who would develop the idea for Top Boy after observing a young Black youth conducting a drugs transaction in a Hackney supermarket car park. At this point, the genre of ‘Black urban’, characterised by films such as Bullet Boy (2004), Kidulthood (2006), Adulthood (2008) and Anuvahood (2011), seemed to be running out of energy, as a combined result of its formulaic narratives, industrial disinterest, and its increasing denigration as a source of Black youth moral panic. 

But the four parts of Top Boy’s first series, screened over consecutive nights, marked a sharp departure from the youth-orientated, repetitive and at times clichéd approaches that had begun to characterise such films. The genre’s omnipresent force, Ashley Walters, was here cast alongside the UK grime artist Kano (as Sully) in his first acting role, and together they brought authenticity and mature, considered intent to the drama’s exploration of the Hackney drug trade.

Much of the journalistic fervour that met the series launch was rooted in an understandable desire to craft easy associations between Top Boy and HBO’s The Wire – an association that has continued throughout Top Boy’s run to date. The show’s complex social analysis of Black life on the fictional Summerhouse Estate seemed to align with The Wire’s tackling of Baltimore’s drugs trade and its impact on the Black community.

It also seemed to bridge two distinct eras of Channel 4 as a public broadcaster. On the one hand, this vision of working-class, inner-city existence gestured back to the radical broadcasting of Channel 4 in the 1980s and early 90s, when the channel had a special remit to represent the minority ethnic identities that had been under/misrepresented by the BBC and ITV. In these years, with shows such as Desmonds and Black on Black, and its support for Black film workshops, Channel 4 had become the natural sphere of Black British representation. 

On the other hand, Top Boy reflected the commercialism that had come to determine the Channel 4 of the 2000s. By this point, the notion of ‘risk taking’ and ‘controversy’ that was so naturally embedded in its early commissioning practices was being consciously engineered in an effort to increase audiences. There was a new emphasis on reality television, and the gradual redefining of documentary as star-led ‘factual content’. 

Top Boy was alive to the emerging youth subcultural practices and market-driven logics of the post digital period, when ‘hard to reach audiences’ could be catered for through ‘on-demand’ viewership. The first series of Top Boy achieved over one million on-demand views and 123,000 tweets during its broadcast week, becoming the most tweeted about programme on Channel 4 since the broadcaster began analysing social media. Successfully trading on the popularity and authenticity of Black music subcultures, the soundtrack, featuring tracks from artists such as AJ Tracey, Ghostpoet, Bugsy Malone and J. Cole, would go on to receive over 23,000 plays. 

Notably, Top Boy was broadcast just weeks after the 2011 English riots, when it derived a special socio-political resonance from its grappling with the underlying factors that had led to the most significant moment of civil disobedience in Britain in a generation, including extreme socio-economic inequality, the austerity politics that had decimated key youth services, and the violent and fatal policing of Britain’s Black communities. Rewatching those first episodes, it’s striking how the show also captures a pre-2012 Olympics east London. Similarly, later series would visually chronologise the failed promises of the Games legacy project, which betrayed long-standing communities in one of the country’s most economically deprived wards. 

All this provided a serendipitous political context that, at least in its first season, Top Boy didn’t always find the narrative means to fully express. But we got snapshots in a range of engaging subplots touching on youth knife crime, the government’s hostile environment policy, and the impacts of gentrification and forced community displacement in the name of urban regeneration.

Many shared Bennett’s shock at the sudden cancellation of Top Boy by Channel 4 after its second series in 2013 (a third season had already been planned). But the following years saw the emergence of streaming platforms, which would redefine television and also partially dismantle the historically overdependent relationship between Black screen representation and the UK’s public service broadcasters. 

It was an intervention by Canadian hip-hop artist and Top Boy fan Drake, who’d contacted Bennett and the Top Boy producers to enquire about its dormant status, which aided the show’s return on Netflix in 2019. In this new home, the revived show saw a notable change in cast, increased production values and a ‘box set’ formula that expanded its scope to 10 one-hour episodes with a distinctive cinematic style.

This new era brought promotional campaigns which have seen Black actors enjoy an unprecedented presence across the front covers and pages of mainstream national print media. And the drama has also crossed into sports and fashion culture – for example, with the production’s sponsoring of the community-based Hackney Wick Football Club, or its collaboration with Drake’s Nike clothing line.

Given the casting of Kano Robinson in the original series, this maximising of talent and brand culture is by no means unique to Top Boy in its Netflix guise. But seeing the likes of rappers Dave, Little Simz, Bashy, Giggs, Sway and the model Adwoa Aboah now turn up in the cast provided audiences with an irresistible access point. It propelled Top Boy beyond its status as scripted drama, amplifying its vision of east London housing estates into a global Black cultural experience.

The use of drill and grime music throughout the series (complemented by the show’s fantastic scoring by Brian Eno) added to the show’s impact as a reference point for a Black urban multiculture. Both these genres were born in the very physical environments that Top Boy depicts – an example of how the series has emphasised the specificities of its setting. Capturing the Afro-Caribbean market stalls of Dalston and the housing estates of Homerton and Haggerston, Top Boy insists on a side of east London and its Black residents that continues to be erased from the preferred image of a gentrified, economically exclusive and racially sanitised Hackney. 

With this in mind, there’s particular iconic value in the use of the real-life Number One Café in London Fields, which is first visited by Dushane in reaction to the hiked coffee prices elsewhere in Hackney. It quickly becomes the headquarters of his and Sully’s international drugs enterprise, and the scene of some of Top Boy’s most memorable, poignant and dramatic moments. Spectacular locations such as Jamaica, Morocco and Spain and a new aesthetic artifice also became a fixture in the show’s Netflix era, but the fifth and final season favours a more local and close-framed formal approach. In many ways, it returns to the original feel, albeit with high-end production values.

If the show has moved on from the social analysis that characterised its Channel 4 days, it may be that Top Boy’s status as a form of global Black popular culture and entertainment on Netflix has liberated it from the need to propose a moral centre. Instead, within its anchoring depictions of armed gang conflict, road culture and drug trafficking, the show achieves a careful balancing act, allowing narrative space for the exploration of family, domestic violence, ageing and death.

At the conclusion of any Black-centred film or drama series, many Black people know all too well a sense of anxiety over the future prospects for the actors they’ve found recognition and identification in. Will we see these performers again? And if so, in what kind of roles? We remain in a protracted struggle for Black screen representation, and despite the acclaim that has been heaped upon Top Boy’s young acting talent across its 12-year cycle, a prejudice persists that Black actors in Black urban dramas are simply ‘playing themselves’. It underpins reductive preconceived ideas about the scope and abilities of young Black actors. 

As such, Black performers are rarely given the opportunity to venture outside of their fixed frames of Black urban realism – though there are, of course, exceptions, and in the examples of Michaela Coel, Micheal Ward and Letitia Wright, Top Boy has created new points of Black stardom, and potentially created pathways by which new kinds of Black film and television narratives can flourish – ones that may or may not be concerned with crime, Black death or the representation of life within London’s housing estates. 

Walters, in particular, has been able to make the typecasting that characterised his early career work in ways that have benefitted him and many others: by establishing his own independent production outfit, SLNda, and working as executive producer on Top Boy; thereby being able to advance opportunities for emerging and established Black actors, production staff, creative talent and crew. If nothing else, the final series of Top Boy presents an opportunity to reflect on Walters’ significant but underappreciated contribution to British film and television.

A sense of authenticity, particularly in relation to Black visual identity, is predicated on the representation of the way that things are, rather than the way we would wish things to be. The significance of Top Boy is in how it challenges its audience to contemplate a Black future through confronting the realities of the Black present. Even after 12 years, the show has yet to be exhausted of its cultural importance or its relevance to a generation of young people, Black or otherwise. Nor has it dated in the context of new audience tastes, social and cultural trends and thematic concerns. 

Over a few weeks every 18 or so months, the successive series have allowed for a concentrated period of engagement, entertainment, celebration and debate, which is unprecedented for a Black British episodic drama. Given the ways in which the urban film/TV genre has been historically dismissed and reduced, we should consider Top Boy as not simply compelling Black cinematic drama, but as a landmark form of Black visual culture that warrants a central place in British film and television history.

Top Boy series 5 is now on Netflix.

Black Boys: The Social Aesthetics of British Urban Film by Clive Nwonka will be published by Bloomsbury on 21 September.