London, 1814: the Thames stinks of tar and treachery, and James Keziah Delaney just crawled out of hell to remind everyone. Tom Hardy doesn’t just play Delaney—he becomes him: a walking wound in a black greatcoat, eyes like cracked flint, every gravel growl dripping with twelve years of African nightmares and a father’s poisoned legacy. He’s half man, half myth, and wholly terrifying.

Steven Knight (with Hardy and his dad Chips co-creating) crafts a slow-burn fever dream: fog so thick you taste it, candle flames trembling like guilty secrets, and rituals that leave blood on the floorboards and questions in your soul. The East India Company (Jonathan Pryce’s silky Sir Stuart Strange at its venomous heart) wants Nootka Sound and Delaney’s head on a spike. They’ll get neither easily.
Jessie Buckley’s Lorna Bow is fire to his ice, Oona Chaplin’s Zilpha a tragic ghost in corsets, Leo Bill’s creepy chemist the perfect worm in the apple. Every alley, every whispered deal, every gunshot in the dark feels alive with rot and ambition.

It’s dense, deliberate, sometimes maddeningly slow—but when it bites, it sinks teeth to the bone. Mud, gunpowder, incest, empire, and the occult swirl into something hypnotic and vicious.
Taboo isn’t television. It’s a curse you binge at your own risk.
Eight episodes of pure, filthy brilliance. Still waiting for Season 2 like a junkie in the rain.

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