Several great stories about the underbelly of Victorian London get smushed together to yield something less great but often extremely entertaining in Steven Knight‘s new Hulu drama, .

Knight comes off less like a master storyteller here than a highly enthusiastic autodidact learning new things and then flailing a bit in making connections. That just means that, at its worst, A Thousand Blows — which caps these first six episodes with a “To Be Continued” title card and clips from additional upcoming episodes — will send interested observers online in search of the true stories about all-female criminal gangs, nascent gloved boxing and 19th-century concert hall performers.

The Bottom Line Entertaining (but not 2.5 times better than 'The 400 Blows').

Airdate: Friday, February 21 (Hulu)

Cast: Malachi Kirby, Stephen Graham, Erin Doherty, Francis Lovehall, Jason Tobin

Creator: Steven Knight

So you’ve got well-acted, well-produced, genre-bending period television and an inspiration to do further research? You could do far worse, and the wildly prolific Knight — he of Peaky Blinders, and — has done both better and worse.