Amazon Prime’s new gangster thriller is edge-of-your-seat viewing

Inevitably, with the Shelbys bowing out in a blockbuster movie, the scramble to find the next Peaky Blinders is on.

The latest contender is The Westies, a new thriller following the real-life and extraordinarily violent Irish-American gang of the same name that ruled Hell’s Kitchen, New York, through unimaginably brutal torture and murder.

Starring J.K. Simmons as the mob’s kingpin, Eamon Sweeney, and Tom Brittney in his first major role since leaving ITV’s Grantchester in 2025 as Jimmy Roarke, a rising member of the Westies, the eight-part MGM+ series actually bears very little resemblance to Steven Knight’s British gang drama, even if the comparisons during the show’s promotional tour have been relentless.

Set in the early 1980s, the series centres on the construction of New York’s Javits Center, which is being built in Westies territory and will no doubt bring with it a significant influx of cash.

Although outnumbered fifty to one by the Five Families of the Italian Mafia, the Westies have carved out their place through ruthless violence and sharp strategy, maintaining a fragile peace that allows both sides to profit. But as tensions grow between the gang’s ambitious younger members and its old-school leadership, that uneasy truce begins to crack.

The resulting power struggle threatens to pull the Westies into the FBI’s expanding investigation into the Italian Mafia, with explosive consequences.

Like Peaky Blinders, The Westies follows a real-life gang through the lens of a fictional protagonist locked in a power struggle with his boss.

It’s not something I’m proud to admit, and perhaps this will permanently destroy my credibility when it comes to reviewing television, but I’ll hold my hands up: I struggled to get on board with Peaky Blinders.

I persevered through multiple attempts to fully commit to the Shelbys, but eventually gave up after it took me almost a year to sluggishly finish the first season.

I’m not going to go as far as saying The Westies is better than Peaky Blinders, but I found it far more bingeable, gulping it down over the course of an uneventful weekend escaping the British heatwave. It gripped me just enough to momentarily ignore a scorching London that felt hotter than the Nevada desert.

Simmons is at his signature best. For someone who is, by all accounts, one of the loveliest men in Hollywood, he’s completely unrivalled when it comes to playing intimidating, manipulative villains who thrive on psychological warfare.

Sweeney is everything you could want from a Simmons performance: a deeply sinister and effortlessly commanding mob boss who will – and does – do whatever it takes to retain control, even if it regularly means sacrificing his own men with fatal consequences.

Brittney proves that life after Grantchester suits him well. This is a terrific departure from playing a crime-solving vicar opposite Robson Green.

Jimmy is a classic gangster antihero – so charming that he can rip out a man’s tongue one moment and still somehow seem like the sort of bloke you’d proudly bring home to your parents.

It’s violent where it needs to be but commendably doesn’t chase gore for shock value in an age when so many television shows seem determined to outdo one another with increasingly inventive ways of killing off their characters.

I wouldn’t go as far as calling it family-friendly viewing, but The Westies has a surprising warmth to it, largely thanks to Jimmy, that shines through the bloodshed. Its relationships feel rich, complicated and unpredictable, with almost everyone looking out for themselves and the stakes remaining feverishly high.

At a time when television has become increasingly reluctant to kill off its main characters (Stranger Things’ final season was simply unforgivable), without giving too much away, The Westies has a sense of jeopardy that many shows have been too cautious to embrace. You hesitate to become too attached to anyone, knowing that death seems to lurk around every corner.

What it occasionally lacks in sophistication, it more than makes up for by being straightforwardly entertaining television – a quality that feels peculiarly overlooked these days.

I don’t know whether I, or anyone else, will still be talking about The Westies years from now, but I had a lot more fun watching it than I ever did during a single episode of Peaky Blinders – comparison or not, and there have already been plenty.

The Westies is available to stream on MGM+ via Amazon Prime Video from July 12.