Who really runs London? Well, nobody really knows because the first season of the hit British Crime Drama ended before revealing the answer to that question. It was still sad to watch the end of Sean Wallace who seemed to have the intention of correcting his father’s mistakes despite being young, impulsive and stupid. There are still enough Wallaces left to take on the Dumanis and the dark forces that owned Finn Wallace but it is a gigantic task, especially after Sean made all those enemies of the other crime families. The show is a great thriller and a second season is in the making and these 10 will keep you Binging as you wait for it.
Undercover
This is a Belgium-Dutch crime drama that has attracted a huge following thanks to the performance of Tom Waes and the drug kingpin Bob Lemmens. The series follows two undercover police officers who are tasked with taking down Lemmens. The only way to reach the Kingpin is by infiltrating his private life by posing a couple living next to the campground where he spends his Weekends. Things get murkier than the police expected as it becomes harder to tell who the bad guys are in the show just as is the case in Gangs of London.
The Pact
Just how bad can a simple workplace prank get? Well, four friends working in a family brewery in Wales found out the hard way after they took their drunken boss to the bushes as a prank only to find him killed by an unknown person a few minutes later. The four now have to deal with the authorities as they struggle with their own problems in their respective families.
They are tested to the level of turning on one another despite struggling to stay together through it all. It turns out that the actual killer is an innocent that they can’t allow to suffer and huge sacrifices have to be made. It doesn’t involve gang violence but the intensity and the family bonds tested and kept are no less than those in Gangs of London.
Zero Zero Zero
Emma Lynwood loves everything about her dad except for the fact that he has to ship cocaine for European drug lords to keep his shipping company afloat. On one fateful day, her father dies after a scary brush with the authorities and now poor Emma is in charge of the company and has to follow in her father’s footsteps. The fate of the company rests on her ability to deliver a huge shipment to Don Minu, the struggling leader of the Ndrangheta in Italy.
The show follows the murky world of the drug business from the toppling of a powerful cartel in Mexico to the brutal quashing of an uprising against Don Minu in Italy. Emma struggles to keep her terminally ill brother out of danger while trying to deliver the most dangerous product across the globe and things get darker and darker just like they did in Gangs of London.
Baptiste
Baptiste is a spinoff of The Missing starring detective Julien Baptiste and his family but this time around, trying to find a missing girl and crackdown on Europe’s human trafficking networks. He meets the missing girl’s uncle who is supposed to be the victim but things are greyer than they seem and the detective who has just had an operation to remove a brain tumour finds himself in trouble. He can’t trust the police nor the gangs, and a son that he unknowingly sired with the police chief turns out to be a top player in the very gangs he is trying to hunt down. It turns out that the apple can actually fall very far from the tree just like they did in the case of Finn Wallace and his children.
Peaky Blinders
WW1 is over but the streets of Birmingham are not safe because gangs and thieves have made life very difficult for Winston Churchill who then sends in detective Sam Neil. The detective discovers that a cache of weapons destined for Libya may actually have been stolen by the Shelby crime family led by Thomas Shelby.
The leader of the gang is a smart cunning man whom the detective finds impossible to corner as he continues expanding his family’s criminal activities into all corners of the 20th-century British economy and politics. A sixth season of the show was requested in January 2021 and it is believed to be the final one. It is the perfect impression of what British crime gangs looked like before Finn Wallace and Ed Dumani ‘took over’ London.
McMafia
Where exactly do boardrooms of the biggest banks in the world meet with the global criminal organizations? Well, Alex Godman, the son of a Russian Mafia boss raised in London finds himself in the middle of all of it when his father and their crime world want to use his job as a banker to legitimize the wealth earned in their life of crime.
So, what does a son do? Help his family get out of the life of crime without facing the consequences or leave his father to pay for his own crimes? Things get murky as Godman is forced to do lots of bad things himself as he is pulled deeper and deeper into his family’s dark world.
Dogs Of Berlin
A famous Turkish footballer dies in Berlin just before a huge game between Germany and Turkey. It is unclear what really killed him but the two detectives tasked with solving his murder find connections between professional football and crime gangs who manipulate players into playing to favour their bets. As the death of Orkan Erdem sends Berlin into a frenzy and threatens to start a race war, detectives Erol Bikram and Kurt Grimmer are forced to break more rules than they imagined possible to bring justice and also prevent a race war. The lives of the two detectives also threaten to worsen tensions as one is the son of the leader of a Neo Nazi gang while the other is an enemy of the leaders of a Turkish Mafia.
Mare Of Easttown
Mare Sheehan is the hero of a town in Philadelphia because she was a star in her high school basketball team decades ago but is now seen as a failed detective because she has failed to solve the murder of a little girl for a year now. She is now tasked with solving the murder of a teenage mother, but she doesn’t even believe in herself anymore because she has just been through so much including the death of her son by suicide. Mare has to deal with a murky underground of Phile, dealing with addicts and drug lords alike to try and solve the cases. She uncovers a side of Easttown that she has never known before.
Bodyguard
This show has become a bigger hit than the producers expected especially after being nominated as the Best Television Series for the Golden Globe Award all thanks to the great performance by Richard Madden. Madden Plays Police Sargent David Budd, tasked with protecting the British home secretary Julia Montague. Budd hates Montague’s politics and is also suffering from PTSD after serving in Afghanistan but now he has to protect her. The two get closer than Budd hoped and their relationship gets personal but Montague has made enemies everywhere including with the leader of an organized crime gang leader who is now out to kill her.
Cobra
Now to the British seat of power itself following the lives of the British Prime Minister Robert Sutherland and his chief of Staff Anna Marshall as they struggle to keep the country together after a solar flare takes out the power grid. Northumberland is the only part of Britain that doesn’t get a relief generator after the grid is taken out and a vigilante group led by a group of gangs take the advantage to blockade it from the rest of the country and the mess soon reaches London as the gangs call for the toppling of the government. It is a great political thriller with less violence and crime than Gangs of London but just as thrilling.
