By When will the sixth season of Peaky Blinders be out? Not until early 2022, according to director Anthony Byrne. Yep, look, I get it, you're disappointed. Of course you are. You love Peaky Blinders. You want more Peaky Blinders.
You've been teased enough at this point. By the time it actually comes out, there might have been enough tidbits floating around from Byrne, showrunner and writer Steven Knight and other members of the team to piece together a rough storyboard of the final two seasons plus whatever spin-offs series, films and interwar Birmingham-themed amusement parks Knight has planned.
But it might do the series some good to take a breather. With each successive season, Peaky Blinders has picked up viewers: its average viewership has leapt from 2.38 million in season one to more than seven million in season five. Things had been getting a little bit overheated. Remember the Legitimate Peaky Blinders Festival from last September? When a series can parlay its popularity into an actual Secret Cinema-style two-day 'immersive recreation', at which actors restage scenes from the series to fans cosplaying as tweedy gangsters and Liam Gallagher and Primal Scream play, it's a fairly gigantic deal.
There's nothing wrong with being so popular that the vaunted Rambert dance company will do you a Peaky-inspired ballet performance wearing the full waistcoat and pocket watch garb, per se. But the broader the cultural awareness of any ongoing TV series gets, the less the particular texture of what made it good in the first place is a priority.
I'm not saying that's exactly what will happen to Peaky. But remember how different Game of Thrones was in season eight, when it contorted itself trying to answer every fan theory on Reddit, compared to season one, when it didn't give a shit about what anyone thought.
The scripts have already been written and shooting had started before coronavirus knocked things back, so the delay's not going to force a fundamental rethink on Peaky Blinders' future. The reset might, though, help to refocus the show's energies, and perhaps concentrate the action back on the conflicts that are at its core.
It was always about Tommy and his guilt and his ambition. Now there's Tommy, and his guilt, and his ambition, and Mosley, and Tommy's career as an MP, and the Americans, and Michael, and Gina, and Churchill, and The World At Large In 1936. At points in the last season you did get the faint sense that Tommy might be turning into a 1930s-based Forrest Gump.
It might also be useful, too, for fans to take a break and rediscover what it was they enjoyed about the Peaky-verse in the first place, away from the minutiae of who might be the Black Cat and divorced from the flat-caps-and-brogues vision of the show that has bled into the broader consciousness. Basically, it's a chance to just see it as a TV show again, which at this point might be exactly what it needs.
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