Okay so I've been sitting on these opinions for a while, and kinda just wanted to air them. SPOILER WARNING FOR PEAKY BLINDERS, I was gonna put a cut but couldn't remember how T-T.
Earlier on this year I watched Peaky Blinders. I enjoyed it, it was a very good show, but I only made it to the first two episodes of season three before I came to a glaringly obvious realisation about the female characters that made me stop watching it - simply out of boredom. I knew what was coming - just when there'd been a spark of happiness, the marriage that I'd been waiting three seasons for, Grace would be killed in the next episode. And... I simply chose not to watch it. I clicked out of the BBC tab, and never picked it back up.
I had come to the realisation that the women in the TV show are there for one thing, and one thing only - to conflict Tommy, or the other men. To either support or torment them. And it put me off entirely.
For example, Grace. Off the bat, when we discover Grace is a spy, we see that she's capable - she has to be to get a position like that. She holds her own, she does what she believes in, she draws her own boundaries. She makes mistakes, many, and in my mind, for the first season she is a deeply flawed character in the same way the men are.
And yet, in the second and the third, these bold characteristics diminished. Her personality dwindled down to one thing - the inner battle between her husband and Tommy, resulting in the obvious choice. She spends the second and third season orbiting around him - I understand he is the main character, and without her 'Spy' plotline she becomes less interesting.
But for the entirety of the later seasons, all we see of her is related back to Tommy. And then, after they finally get married, she's killed off. When she becomes a mother, and a wife, no longer conflicted, no longer dangerous - she serves no plot purpose. She no longer strikes tragedy in Tommy's soul, and they simply shoot her dead and use that to torment Tommy further. She's just discarded, pushed off to the side, despite the promise of what her character could've been.
I have seen some people refer to Grace as 'the woman who had too much influence'. And I agree. I genuinely think if she had lived, she might've pushed Tommy towards a better path, and the writers might've thought that would've made him less interesting, so just killed her off. Her death and Charlie's survival only ends up serving Tommy's misery.
- On the other hand, there's May Carleton, the horse trainer. When they first meet and the scene in the bar I almost had a flicker of hope that they'd become good business partners, and remain so. That hope was very quickly thrown out the window when they slept together - when May's character was shrunk down to her infatuation with Tommy.
She's a strong woman, a smart woman, who has valuable skills and assets. She denies wanting an intimate relationship, she's experienced the loss that he has - her husband gone - and yet she falls into him nonetheless. And in my mind, this was when it began to seem to me that any and all women introduced into the plotline were there for no other reason than to serve the Shelby men, no matter how promising or interesting their personality.
May becomes jealous at the end of season two, she becomes no more than a fling to Tommy, and it just seemed a waste to me, of someone who could've become a character that did so much more than fall in love and have sex with Tommy.
- And then there's Polly. Polly, who is to me arguably the best character in Peaky Blinders, played by the beautiful Helen McCroy who serves face in everything she's ever been in.
I'm going to make a rather uncomfortable point here - that if Polly's character hadn't been written to be older, and to be family, I fully believe that her personality would've been twisted into a romantic prospect for Tommy, just like Lizzie, Grace, and May. The things that protect Polly from this repetitious trope are the fact that she is family, and that she is older, taking on an almost matriarchal role.
And yet, even then, it doesn't stop Polly's character from becoming a victim to Tommy's tormented and self-serving ways. However, even then, to me, she remains his foundation. She keeps him on the best path she can. Her character - arguably the most complex and interesting of them all, with her backstory, her firmness, her motherly-role, her sharp wit and tongue - still serves the Shelby men and the Blinders.
Even when she has her own plot, getting back her son, it quickly falls back into that trope once he starts doing the books for them.
I do, however, understand that at the end of the day the show is about Tommy and the Peaky Blinders. They will always be the main plot, the main focus, everything will always lead back to them. It doesn't particularly change my argument.
Overall, my point is that I liked Peaky Blinders, a lot, but the constant crafting of these well-written and diverse female characters, which were then discarded or changed to focus on Tommy quickly began to grate on my nerves, and I just had to get it out there. Fat sigh.
