A Genre Reborn
Television has always had a soft spot for the gangster saga, but something has shifted in the underworld. This week, Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen returns to Netflix for its second outing, and the show that once looked like another boys’ club affair has become something altogether more pointed. Theo James reprises his role as Eddie Halstead, the distractingly handsome aristocrat tumbling deeper into organised crime, but it is Kaya Scodelario’s Susie Glass who continues to dominate the conversation. Her performance as the immaculately turned-out head of an underground cannabis empire has done more than earn plaudits. It has crystallised a movement.
The wider cultural moment is impossible to ignore. In August, reports surfaced that the Duchess of Sussex was in early discussions to appear in a potential third season of The Gentlemen, fresh from her and Prince Harry’s surprise return to the UK. Meghan’s reported interest might have looked like a curious departure for an actress once synonymous with Suits and now better known for her Montecito-made preserves, but it reflects a genre-wide recalibration. Crime drama, long the most testosterone-soaked corner of the small screen, is being reshaped by its female characters, and the viewing public cannot get enough.
The New Crime Queens
Scodelario’s Susie is the millennial reimagining of a stock archetype. She favours a bold red lip and an outfit fit for an Instagram grid, yet her femininity is decorative rather than defining. Where the men of Ritchie’s universe are hemmed in by inheritance and expectation, she slips between worlds with ease. In the season two premiere alone, Susie is seen in tweed at a grouse shoot, in a suit bidding £16 million on a Botticelli, scheming in a lakeside sauna, pursuing masked thieves on bicycles, and negotiating with a distinctly menacing Italian mob boss. She flirts with Eddie, though whether anything more substantial lies beneath remains deliberately ambiguous.
Speaking in 2024, Scodelario was candid about how the role was initially misread. Audiences expected Susie to be the girlfriend, the wife, the sidekick. “What I liked about her was that this isn’t a story about her learning how to be a criminal,” she said. “She’s already at the top of the ladder.”
She is not alone in her dominion. On Netflix’s Black Doves, Tracey Ullman plays Alex Clark, the most powerful organised crime figure in the country, with tendrils reaching into the heart of Westminster. Her professional assassins are managed by Kathryn Hunter’s Lenny Lines, a grudge-bearing operator whose diminutive frame only sharpens her menace. Over on Paramount+, MobLand returns this month, and while Pierce Brosnan’s Conrad Harrigan and Tom Hardy’s fixer Harry Da Souza command attention, it is Helen Mirren’s Maeve who lingers in the memory. The Irish matriarch is as protective as she is bloodthirsty, a walking reminder that the most dangerous person in any crime family is often the one pouring the tea.
Beyond the Matriarch
For decades, women in crime drama have fallen into two familiar camps. There are the objects of desire, written thinly and frequently sidelined, and there are the matriarchs, those quietly terrifying figures who pull financial or political strings while their husbands and sons take the public flak. Polly Gray in Peaky Blinders, played with steel by the late Helen McCrory, remains the gold standard of the latter, while Youn Yuh-jung brought a deliciously corrupt energy to her country club owner in the second season of Netflix’s Beef.
What’s different in 2026 is how the archetype is stretching. In HBO’s Euphoria, Martha Kelly’s Laurie refuses to fit any pre-existing template. She is neither a sex symbol nor a family linchpin. Her affection is reserved almost entirely for her pet parrot, Paladin. She engages in a murderous turf war with fellow drug lord Alamo Brown and, right up until the grisly finale, sits atop her empire with no one to answer to. Her deadpan menace signals a character written without the usual concessions to audience expectation.
This is the shift that matters. Where the matriarch operates through familial leverage, characters like Susie and Laurie wield power on their own terms, outside the traditional structures that have long defined the genre. They are not wives, daughters, or mothers first and gangsters second. They are gangsters full stop.
The Ritchie Universe, Leveled Up
The Gentlemen’s second season arrives with the polish of Netflix’s grandest prestige offerings, a far cry from the kitchen-sink energy of Ritchie’s early work. Comparisons to The Crown and House of Cards now feel apt, and crucially, the show is making more room for women than any Ritchie project to date. In Susie’s orbit, aristocrats may be the original organised criminals, but they are no longer the most competent.
It is not hard to see why Meghan might have been drawn to the world. The Gentlemen is glossy, twist-laden, and quietly radical in how it positions its women. Whether or not the rumours translate into a screen credit, the cultural signal has already been sent. The gangster genre, long the most reliable refuge for machismo, has been colonised by women who look nothing like the genre’s usual suspects. The damsels are gone. The bosses have arrived.
Season two of The Gentlemen premieres on Netflix on 3 September.
Why It Matters
The rise of the female gangster is not merely a casting trend. It marks a deeper renegotiation of how British and American television frames power, ambition, and criminality. For decades, crime drama has asked audiences to accept that men will operate at every level of the underworld while women wait at home or scheme from the margins. By placing women at the apex of these hierarchies, with no explanatory backstory required, shows like The Gentlemen, Black Doves, and MobLand are rewriting what villainy looks like. These characters don’t need a trauma origin story or a husband to justify their authority. They simply are. That shift ripples well beyond prestige television, signalling a broader cultural appetite for stories in which women are permitted to be as ruthless, strategic, and terrifying as their male counterparts.
