Our First Look at 'Dope Girls' Celebrates Women's Wrongs

Thanks in no small part to creator Steven Knight, the concept of the gritty early 20th-century period drama is having something of a moment. A direct contrast to the more lavish, high-end dramas like Downton Abbey or Bridgerton, these stories tend to focus on working or lower-class characters in settings that look very different from the gilded halls of Highclere Castle. But, as the old saying goes, what's good for the goose is good for the gander, and The forthcoming BBC series Dope Girls looks primed to put a feminist spin on Knight's style of period crime drama.

The drama, inspired by Marek Kohn’s nonfiction book Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground, is set in London in 1918, just after the war ended. A generation of newly empowered women was reluctant to give up the self-sufficiency (and earning potential) they'd gained during the war years. The series focuses specifically on the forgotten time in history when female gangs were running the clubs in London's Soho, dealing in drugs and moonshine. Dope Girls aims to detail the birth of the modern nightlife industry guided and gilded by hard-fought female endeavor.

Much of this trend is due to the massive success of Knight's Peaky Blinders, the popular Birmingham-set gangster family drama that ran for six seasons and made a star out of Cillian Murphy (Oppenheimer). (Knight's next series, the Victorian boxing drama involving the all-female gang Forty Elephants, A Thousand Blows, will arrive in February.)