Top Boy, Netflix, review: Ashley Walters and Kano make a magnificent return

“You’re a victim of your own success,” Dushane Hill’s money launderer tells him in the new series of Top Boy. It certainly seems from this opener like things are going well for Hackney’s drug kingpin. The Summerhouse estate is finally at peace and business is booming.

Last season, the gang framed rival Jamie (Micheal Ward) and then subsequently offered him an olive branch. Here, Jamie is out of prison and working with Dushane (Ashley Walters), who is happily loved up with Shelley (Little Simz) and planning to soon “go legit”.

But life in Top Boy is built on a precarious house of cards – almost literally in this case with the planned redevelopment of the Summerhouse estate, the evictions and scattering of the community ironically funded by Dushane in an attempt to avoid paying taxes.

Meanwhile trouble is on the horizon thanks to Jamie’s simmering resentment at his new subservience to his former adversary. Then there is the collapse of a crucial deal on the continent triggered by a nail-biting final shootout that serves as a reminder that events in Hackney have far-reaching roots.

Top Boy never forgets that the big showy moments only work if it gets the small stuff right, from Jamie’s affection for his younger brothers to a mother’s desperate search for her son, Ats, who is just one of the many young estate kids sucked into Dushane’s vortex.

Walters is as magnetic as ever, imbuing Dushane with a worrying cockiness, but he is matched by Kane Robinson as former right-hand man Sully, tormented by what he has done in the name of their illegal empire.

Just as in previous series, none of these characters are caricatures, none of the dialogue feels forced and there isn’t a weak link in the whole cast. Top Boy is a show that always stays true to itself: made for people who have watched and loved it from the very start.

Top Boy is streaming on Netflix now