Ronan Bennett
Ronan Bennett is a writer, born 1956.
Ronan Bennett is a novelist who moved into television and then, unusually, stayed to run things. The screen credits before Top Boy are film work: the 1997 crime picture Face, Michael Mann's Public Enemies in 2009, the BBC historical miniseries Gunpowder in 2017. None of them quite prepares you for how completely he owns the thing he is best known for.
Top Boy is a drug-trade drama set on a London estate, and its central formal choice is patience. Bennett writes scenes that do not explain themselves. Characters use the vocabulary they would actually use, the economics of the operation are shown rather than described, and the police are frequently just absent, because on the timescale the show cares about they are irrelevant. It first ran in 2011 and returned in 2019 in a bigger form that kept the discipline.
Since then he has been working at scale. The Day of the Jackal, his series version of a very famous assassination thriller, took a Golden Globe nomination and a second-series renewal, and MobLand is the most conventionally starry thing on his list. The open question about the later work is whether the restraint survives the budget.
TV (5)
Where to start with Ronan Bennett
Start at the beginning, which here means the 2011 Top Boy rather than the later one. The original run is short, shot cheap, and the best argument for Bennett as a writer: it trusts you to keep up with the slang, the geography and the money without a single scene of exposition. Then take Top Boy, the 2019 continuation, which has more resources and more characters and, remarkably, does not soften.
After that, The Day of the Jackal is the mainstream version of the same skills, a procedural thriller that spends most of its running time on logistics, which is what the original story was always about. MobLand is the one to try last; it is louder and less interested in what makes his other work distinctive. His film scripts, including Public Enemies and Gunpowder, are not among the credits listed here, but they are worth chasing if the television makes you want the prose.