Taboo (BBC One / FX, 2017) is a revenge gothic set in Regency London, built on the premise that one furious, half-feral man can make himself too dangerous to kill and too costly to ignore. Tom Hardy co-created and stars as James Keziah Delaney, who returns from twelve years in Africa to claim a worthless piece of land on the Columbia River that the East India Company and the American government both urgently need. The show's real subject is how empires extract value, and what it costs to refuse that extraction. Slow-burning, violent, and dense with period texture, it makes the fog of 1814 London feel like a moral condition. Steven Knight (Peaky Blinders) co-wrote every episode. If that combination of historical dread, one-man-versus-institution fury, and atmosphere thick enough to cut holds you, the recommendations below cover every medium that does it well.
Essential Taboo
The show's eight episodes, and the creative world it came from
Period Noir: Same Fog, Different Streets
TV series that place a dangerous outsider inside a corrupt historical world
One Man Against the Machine: Films
Movies about lone individuals who refuse to be consumed by the systems around them
The Gothic Empire in Print
Novels built on colonial dread, moral rot, and men trying to outrun what they have done
![The Count of Monte-Cristo [3/5]](https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/14557288-L.jpg)
Atmosphere and Moral Weight: Games
Games that share Taboo's density of place, period violence, and systems of power
Peaky Blinders is the Closest Companion
Both shows come from Steven Knight, both center on a single charismatic criminal intelligence operating inside a world of venal institutions, and both use anachronistic music to make the period feel alive rather than costumed. Peaky Blinders has more scale and more seasons. Taboo is tighter, stranger, and more willing to go somewhere genuinely mythic with its protagonist's interiority. Start with either; you will want the other immediately.
The Proposition Understands the Same Violence
John Hillcoat's Australian outback Western (scripted by Nick Cave) operates in the same moral register as Taboo: colonial violence that the story refuses to glamorize, a protagonist who is complicit and still somehow the least corrupt person in the frame, and a landscape that functions as judgment. The Proposition is one of the great unsung films of the 2000s for anyone who responds to Taboo's bleak historical honesty.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is the Closest a Game Gets
Arthur Morgan's story is about the same thing Taboo is about: a man who understands the system he serves is rotten, who cannot fully leave it, and who is trying to find some action that has integrity anyway. The period is different (1899 American frontier vs 1814 London), but the moral texture is almost identical. RDR2 also happens to be one of the best-written characters in games. If the slow, deliberate, atmosphere-first pace of Taboo is what you loved, RDR2 rewards the same kind of patience.
Heart of Darkness is the Book Underneath It All
Taboo's James Delaney comes back from Africa carrying something unspoken, and the show keeps that debt to Conrad visible. Heart of Darkness is short, ferocious, and still disturbing in ways that literary recontextualization has not fully defused. Reading it alongside Taboo makes both sharper. If you want the same colonial dread in longer form, Conrad's Nostromo covers similar empire-as-moral-corruption ground at greater length.
A Rough Map of the Territory
- 1899Conrad publishes Heart of Darkness (serialized); the template for the corrupted colonial survivor is set
- 1844Dumas publishes The Count of Monte Cristo: the man-returned-to-exact-revenge as a literary archetype
- 2004Deadwood premieres on HBO: Swearengen as prototype for the Taboo anti-hero in a frontier power vacuum Deadwood
- 2006The Proposition released: colonial violence with full moral weight and no redemption arc The Proposition
- 2007There Will Be Blood: Daniel Plainview as the era's defining portrait of extractive capitalism There Will Be Blood
- 2013Peaky Blinders premieres: Steven Knight's period-crime template that Taboo refines Peaky Blinders
- 2017Taboo premieres on BBC One and FX; Tom Hardy and Knight co-create the show together Taboo
- 2018Red Dead Redemption 2 releases: the closest a game has come to this brand of atmospheric moral weight Red Dead Redemption 2
Empire blood and gothic frontier
For Fans of Cillian Murphy
Explore the For Fans of Cillian Murphy guide →I have a use for you. You are not going to die just yet.James Keziah Delaney, Taboo