Once again Drake exec produces a hit.

After a six-year absence, the British crime drama Top Boy has returned, thanks to executive producer Drake and to Netflix. After Channel 4 dropped the series in 2013, the show found a second life and new viewers, including the rap mogul, who guided the project along during the pitch process after purchasing the rights in 2017. And with the superstar attached, it makes sense that Top Boy got more ambitious. While the first two season comprised four episodes each, Netflix ordered ten for season three. To American viewers, Top Boy probably feels like David Simon’s The Wire, but with a different pitter-patter. For those across the pond, season three’s depiction of the cutthroat London drug trade will strike a raw nerve, hitting so close to home.

Drake and cast members Ashley Walters, Micheal Ward, and Simbiatu Ajikawo at the “Top Boy” UK premiere. Image via Netflix.

Ashley Walters stars as Dushane, the “top boy,’” or gang leader, at the fictional Summerhouse housing project (or “estate,” as it is known on the show) in Hackney, East London, who is on the run from a rival gang in Jamaica at the beginning of the new season. While no stranger to the drug trade and a formidable strategist, Dushane like all the characters in Top Boy, has difficulty handling the heat. “There was a time people didn’t understand this world existed here,” says Dushane, and the world he inhabits in Top Boy is damn intense. Alongside his partner, Sully, played by UK rapper Kano, Dushane is constantly fighting for survival. Their enemies — other gangs and dealers from underdeveloped communities — are dangerous: real people with pressing needs of their own.

Series creator Ronan Bennet, the sole writer of all but two of the episodes in the entire series, does a wonderful job making you believe no character is safe; even plain-clothed law-enforcement officers can catch a bullet if they’re unlucky.

Dushane in Jamaica before his return home (image via Netflix)

Much like The Wire, Top Boy provides a nuanced, credible depiction of the illicit drug economy at work, in addition to its impact on different facets of life, including school, parent-child relationships, and neighborhoods. On television and in real life, savvy, ruthless adults are paying kids to run drugs. As in real-life criminal enterprises, only a few of the Summerhouse mandem get to share the wealth, but those who do rarely get to revel in their success; a threat is always looming, and maybe their cash isn’t so clean.

Top Boys eloquently embraces race as a theme. In the show’s first season, eight years old but still relevant, the power dynamic between white characters and characters of color was unique and understated. Most of Dushane and Sully’s crew is black. Their supplier is a white Englishman by the name of Bobby Raikes, who, while he claims to be from the same rough-and-tumble estates as Dushane, hasn’t lived there recently. But it’s not as simple as the white man on top and black man on bottom. . . . White people are on the bottom of this food chain too. In all three seasons, the junkies fiending are almost exclusively white. With their dulled, zombie-like movements, they approach the black dealers for drugs and verbal abuse. White on top of black on top of white. Still, it’s predominantly the black characters who end up being shot and killed, either by police or rival dealers.

Dushane meets Jamie, leader of the rival gang, the ZT’s (image via Netflix).

This complex dynamic is apparent inside the gang as well. In season one, we meet Gem, a Turkish or Albanian, estate kid with a missing mother and a drunk, abusive father, who finds himself working for Dushane and Sully. Soon into his tenure, he is accused of being a snitch. In this instance, it’s the white character who belongs to the racial outgroup, and we can sense other characters trusting him less, partially because of the color of his skin. And we when we see Gem in season three, his face is wrinkled and scabbed, worn down; he’s now using the drugs he had sold as a kid.

A behind-the-scenes photo of Gem and Chantelle from season one of ‘Top Boy’ (image via Giacomo Mancini on Twitter)

In season three, on Netflix, current events heighten the racial intricacies. Early on, Sully, Gem, and Jason, a street kid “adopted” by Sully in season two, travel to Ramsgate in Kent, a county that voted overwhelmingly to leave the European Union in 2016. Sully and Jason rent a room from a migrant family and see the verbal and physical abuse the family faces up close. After watching racist Brexiters yell slurs at the migrant family through a window, Gem remarks, “The joke is it’ll be them lot lining up to get their food tonight,” in reference to the white, working-class Brexiters being drug users too. Addiction does not discriminate.

More complex ideas related to the drug trade are present as well, including the whether or not the trade needs to be violence. The dealers adapt to an increased, more militarized, police presence by using drones to transfer drugs and money in the dead of night. In the wake of a gang-inspired acid attack on low-level Summerhouse dealers, a lover remarks to a female Summerhouse lieutenant, “I know people who want what you’re selling, and they’re not the kind of people who throw acid in your face.” She’s right: the drug trade doesn’t have to be violent.

On a lighter note, it’s impossible to watch Top Boy without being taken by the local slang and sharp accents. Through every pore, the show feels British. Characters cheer for Premier League teams, call each other “bruv” or “blud,” and are always quick to greet one another by saying “wagwan,” meaning, “What’s going on?” in Jamaican English.

“Lancashire police compiled a glossary to help officers understand the youth” (image via The Times UK)

The show does a masterful job establishing Afro-English culture. This is especially impressive considering Ronan Bennet is white and from Northern Ireland. Aided by a soundtrack The Guardian called “a showcase of UK rap’s strength and diversity,” we feel the characters entrenched in their heritage and proud as they eat jerk chicken dinners. In these moments there’s true joy even for downtrodden characters; even with immigration enforcement agents banging down their doors, threatening deportation, Amma and her young son Ats are able to find a happy moment or two.

Ats and Stefan out of their element, on the street (image via Netflix).

But most impressive about the return of Top Boy is how the creatives handled the expanded series as the show switched from the English limited series model to the American expanded season model. And the new season concludes with a remarkably American scene: a reveal implying there are more seasons to come. Personally, I can’t wait.

Paley Matters is a publication of The Paley Center for Media.