You Might Not Know Steven Knight’s Name, but He’s a Dad Show Auteur and a Maniac
A Dad Shows guide to the creator of Peaky Blinders, The Veil, and a million other things
TV writers in the UK are different from American ones. They’re often more prolific and work across different genres more often. I’m talking about guys like Joe Barton (Giri/Haji, The Lazarus Project) and Jack Thorne (His Dark Materials, the deeply underrated kitchen sink drama The Virtues).
But no Brit is more prolific – or more all over the place – than Steven Knight.
Knight is best known for creating Peaky Blinders, one of the most iconic Dad Shows of all time. He’s a first-ballot Dad Show Hall of Famer just for that. But that’s just one of the very, very, very many things he’s done.
He’s had a bizarrely eclectic career, spanning TV and film, Dad Shows and not, excellent to absolutely terrible.
He started his TV career by co-creating the game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, which is such a weird outlier fact in his filmography that I don’t even know what to do with it. He was then nominated for an Oscar for his first produced screenplay, the London-set crime drama Dirty Pretty Things. He followed that up with Eastern Promises, another London-set crime drama that’s still the best thing he’s ever done.
He could have settled into a groove as a London crime guy, but then he went in a different direction. He wrote and directed Locke, the movie where Tom Hardy drives a car and talks on the phone. He wrote The Hundred-Foot Journey, a feel-good dramedy. He wrote the Princess Diana biopic with Kristen Stewart.
In 2013, he moved to prestige TV with Peaky Blinders. Since then, he has been on an absolute tear. He has created nine shows in the past seven years. (His latest, The Veil, is out this week.) He’s like Ryan Murphy, if Ryan Murphy wrote every word of the shows he produces.
Knight’s shows and movies span genres and don’t on the surface have much in common that mark them as a Steven Knight production. He doesn’t really have a signature the way other major creators do.
From reading interviews, it kind of seems like he’s primarily driven by a personal connection to the material (Peaky Blinders is inspired by stories his parents told him about Birmingham history; he adapted Great Expectations because, like Pip, he’s the son of a blacksmith, he’s written movies about chefs because he loves to cook, etc). He’s interested in history and class, and where they intersect. He likes to write about social misfits, and he dislikes subtlety.
But more than anything else, a Steven Knight joint is marked by a certain type of…insanity. I’m not quite sure how else to put it. There’s just always something wild happening. Jason Momoa is blind! Tom Hardy is in an incestuous relationship with his half-sister Oona Chaplin! Scrooge got molested! Miss Havisham smokes opium now!
Knight likes bold ideas that fail more often than they succeed.
In 2019, he made See, the show where Jason Momoa is blind, an edgy limited series adaptation of A Christmas Carol, and the movie Serenity, in which Matthew McConaughey plays a fisherman plotting to murder his ex-wife’s abusive new husband, but then in a Shyamalanian twist it turns out he’s a character in a video game.
Serenity is objectively one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, because it’s too boring to be so-bad-it’s-good. The Ringer’s Miles Surrey, who has also observed the quiet phenomenon of Knight’s highly prolific, highly insane output, called his 2019 trio “inimitable, terrible, and, frankly, iconic,” which pretty much sums it up. Nobody does it like Steven Knight.
A few of the many upcoming projects he has in various stages of production include another season of SAS: Rogue Heroes, a 19th-century boxing drama series for Hulu called A Thousand Blows, the Peaky Blinders movie, a Maria Callas biopic with Angelina Jolie, a remake of Vertigo with Robert Downey Jr., and a fucking Star Wars movie.
So all of this is to say, I find Steven Knight totally fascinating. As far as I can tell, he’s never gotten a major magazine profile, and I think he deserves one. If you’re an editor reading this, please hire me. I will fly to Birmingham and go to a soccer game with him and try to figure out what makes him tick. It would be awesome.
A Dad Shows guide to Steven Knight
Since Steven Knight has so many shows and you might not know all of them are his, I’ve put together a little guide to his TV output from Peaky Blinders to now. I’ve assigned each one a score based on how much of a Dad Show it is, how insane it is, and how good it is. (For the record, I consider Who Wants to Be a Millionaire to be a Dad Show, because my dad and I used to quote a contestant named Omer who was so nervous that when Regis Philbin said “Hiya, Omer,” he just made a honking sound like “gnaa.” It was hilarious.)
I’m going in reverse-chronological order, starting with:
The Veil (2024)
Elisabeth Moss stars as a British intelligence agent who has to figure out if the female ISIS member she’s transporting from Turkey to Paris is low-level or high-level. It’s pretty tame by Steven Knight standards. The craziest thing about it is Peggy Olsen’s posh London accent.
DAD SHOW RATING: 8/10
INSANITY RATING: 3/10
QUALITY RATING: 6.5/10 (this is the grade I gave it in my review for TV Guide.)
WHERE TO STREAM: Hulu
This Town (2024)
This is the only one I haven’t seen at all, because it’s not currently available to stream in America, so I can’t rate it. It’s about young people in early ‘80s Birmingham who start a band to try to escape from the harshness of life in the deindustrializing city.
All the Light We Cannot See (2023)
This World War II drama is based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Knight teamed up with Hollywood’s current leading popcorn director Shawn Levy for it. They are not the guys you hire to make a show with depth and nuance. It’s about a blind girl who plays an important role in the French resistance.
DAD SHOW RATING: 2/10
INSANITY RATING: 2/10
QUALITY RATING: 1/10
WHERE TO STREAM: Netflix
Great Expectations (2023)
When Steven Knight adapts Charles Dickens, he likes to add sex, violence, and general darkness that he believes is implied in Dickens’ texts but Dickens could not depict. He tends to overdo it. Olivia Colman is great in it, though.
DAD SHOW RATING: 4/10
INSANITY RATING: 6/10
QUALITY RATING: 5/10
WHERE TO STREAM: Hulu
SAS: Rogue Heroes (2022)
This WWII series gathers a bunch of lads (Connor Swindells, Jack O’Connell, Alfie Allen, etc.) and puts them in an anarchic action series about the founding of a British special forces unit. It’s just really crazy that the same guy made this and the treacly All the Light We Cannot See a year apart
DAD SHOW RATING: 10/10
INSANITY RATING: 5/10
QUALITY RATING: 7.5/10
WHERE TO STREAM: MGM+
A Christmas Carol (2019)
Knight’s first edgy, gritty Dickens adaptation is so self-consciously provocative that it’s actually pretty cheesy. But know one can accuse him of not going for it.
DAD SHOW RATING: 5/10
INSANITY RATING: 9/10
QUALITY RATING: 3/10
WHERE TO STREAM: Amazon
See (2019-2022)
A post-apocalyptic thriller set in a future where almost everyone is blind, and Jason Momoa has to protect two children who can see. If I got to profile Steven Knight, I would ask him what his connection to blindness is. See is unusual for him in that he worked with collaborators and left the show after Season 1. He can definitely be blamed for a lot of how bad it is, though.
DAD SHOW RATING: 7/10
INSANITY RATING: 7/10
QUALITY RATING: 4/10
WHERE TO STREAM: Apple TV+
Taboo (2017)
Perhaps even more than Peaky Blinders, this is the most Steven Knight show there is. Tom Hardy is an amoral, borderline feral dude working the upper and lower classes for his own purposes in early 19th-century London.
DAD SHOW RATING: 10/10
INSANITY RATING: 10/10
QUALITY RATING: 8/10
WHERE TO STREAM: Freevee
Peaky Blinders (2013-2022)
You know it, you love it, you got your hair cut like Cillian Murphy in 2015.
DAD SHOW RATING: 10/10
INSANITY RATING: 7/10
QUALITY RATING: 9/10
WHERE TO STREAM: Netflix