Sky’s New Crime Drama Is A Stylish 80’s Throwback
Crime drama fans have been spoilt recently with shows like the BBC’s Happy Valley and the upcoming The Gold providing thrillingly watchable TV, and now Sky is getting in on the act with their new drama A Town Called Malice, set to arrive later this year on Sky Max.
Much like The Gold, it begins in 1980s London and follows the Lord family, who specialise in petty thievery and are looking to use a recent and unexpected windfall to get to Spain to avoid police attention.
Written and created by Nick Love, who wrote and directed films like The Business, The Sweeney and The Football Factory, A Town Called Malice will be eight parts long and stars Jason Flemyng (Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels), Jack Rowan (Noughts and Crosses) and Tahriah Sharif (The Haunting of Bly Manor).
Much like Love’s The Business and Sexy Beast, the series is set in the Costa del Sol in Spain, a region of Spain in which many British criminals would move in order to evade justice for their crimes and live a luxurious life. The youngest and smartest son of the Lord crime family, Gene (Rowan) becomes tired of being constantly overlooked and undervalued by the rest of the Lord’s and flees to the “Sunshine Coast” with his fiancee Cindy (Sharif), having both survived an attempted gang shooting.
The two are quick to find themselves a part of the local underworld of the Costa del Sol and aren’t able to stay out of trouble long. Things are exacerbated for them when the rest of the family, headed by Albert (Flemyng) fly in from London and realise that they’ve found a place to stay out of police detection. The gangster family can no longer run the lucrative business it once could, and the Costa del Sol provides the perfect opportunity to bring themselves back to their former glory.
The series is fully immersed in the nostalgia of the 80s, and soundtracked by a throwback soundtrack of hits of the early decade. As Sky’s preview of the series colourfully puts it: “If Dallas made love to Pulp Fiction to the sounds of Duran Duran, they’d give birth to A Town Called Malice.” The series will arrive on Sky Max and NOW later in 2023.
A Town Called Malice will drop on Sky Max and NOW later in 2023.
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