William Golding’s 1954 novel has been adapted for film twice — Peter Brook’s bleak 1963 version and Harry Hook’s muddled 1990 American take — and neither has held up as a definitive interpretation. Jack Thorne, who wrote Adolescence, now has a four-episode BBC series that landed on Netflix in the US on May 4, and critics are calling it the adaptation that may make all subsequent attempts unnecessary. The Rotten Tomatoes score sits at 91%.

Some shows are born great. Some achieve greatness. Peaky Blinders did something rarer: it arrived fully formed, ascended to an almost unreachable peak, held there just long enough to feel mythic, and then descended with the slow, sad inevitability of a man who has survived too many bullets and started to believe his own legend. The arc of Peaky Blinders is, in its own way, a perfect parable about what happens when a story stops being about something and starts being about its own continuation.