A new series Dope Girls has been developed by the BBC – described as the “spiritual successor” to Peaky Blinders.
Dope Girls is new crime series about a female gangster in Soho’s historical wretched neighbourhood. The show will be a six-part series debuting on BBC One, produced by Bad Wolf. According to Deadline, Dope Girls is a “spiritual successor of Peaky Blinders” and is currently in the discussion stages with US production partners and streaming services.
The storyline hasn’t been finalised yet, but it will follow the beginning of the London nightclub scene in Soho.
The show will tackle the non-fiction book Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground by Marek Kohn, including fictional characters and storylines, exploring all angles of the criminal world in Soho during the 20th century.
It is partly based on the true story of an independent 42-year-old single mother, Kate Meyrick, who owns a nightclub empire and Mobstyle enterprise and is crowned the most dangerous woman in London and the enemy of Baron Chang, the boss of Soho’s grimy underworld.
Her nightclub is powered by drugs and alcohol, becoming the Number One spot for World War One survivors to forget their postpartum stress disorder after returning from war. It will also capture women owning the right to be open about their sexuality as they use sex and drugs to dominate men.
Filming is set to begin later this year, and casting will be revealed at a later date.
In other news, Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight has put out a casting call for skinheads to star in his new BBC drama This Town.
Announced late last year, This Town “tells the story of an extended family and four young people who are drawn into the world of ska and two-tone music, which exploded from the grass roots of Coventry and Birmingham in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, uniting black, white and Asian youths”.
Levi Brown, Jordan Bolger, Ben Rose and Eve Austin will star as the four young leads, with filming beginning in Wolverhampton earlier this year. Casting agency Mad Dog 2020 has since appealed (via Birmingham Live) for “skinheads and people with shaved heads… in and around West Bromwich” to become involved with the show, but only if they “have good availability from now until the end of February”, when filming presumably wrapped.
After the sixth and final season of Peaky Blinders aired last year, lead star Cillian Murphy said that the script to a follow-up movie was “close” to being finished – with other TV spin-offs said to be in the works too.
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