Fightland Review

Fightland, the new Starz gangland crime drama from Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson (who is executive producing the series following the success of Power on the same network), shares a lot of its DNA with a lot of other stories you’ll have seen before – among them Peaky Blinders, Mobland, and A Thousand Blows. Its bones are from Alexander Dumas’ “The Count of Monte Cristo,” as we watch Duke (a very good Howard Charles) win the heavyweight boxing championship in the opening of the pilot only to lose everything after it comes out that he’s been sleeping with his promoter – and general gangster – Kingsley’s wife. Kingsley retaliates with his goons, resulting the death of someone close to Duke, and when Duke fights back, he’s the one who ends up serving time in prison. When he’s released eight years later, he returns home to London looking for revenge for the time he served.

For a show like Fightland, whether or not you’ll enjoy it is tied into just how much you like a pretty paint-by-numbers story of battles in the underbelly of the London drug trade. If you’re looking for a boxing series, well, that’s not really what the show is looking to give you – although the series is very clear about the criminal element that is very much a part of the boxing world. There’s a lot of set up here – particularly once Duke is back in London and re-acclimating himself to the state of Kingsley’s crew (he’s more or less disappeared and his son and daughter are running the empire now, both the more legitimate boxing side and the drug trade). But as the season goes on, things get tighter from a story-perspective and co-creators Daniel Fajemisin Duncan and Marlon Smith seem to know where things are going.

But there’s just not enough here to really differentiate the series from anything that you’ve seen before. Charles is good as Duke, but it’s not a particularly exceptional performance that can carry the series over the numerous bumps in the early going. The story doesn’t have a hook that can draw you in or surprise you and make you want to come back for more. Perhaps, down the line, the series will make that leap, but as of now, there aren’t enough compelling characters or narrative traction to really make Fightland something special that is worth your time and energy.

That is unless you’re someone who is really into the copious number of gangland series currently on TV. In that case, you might find elements of the series are just different enough from something like A Thousand Blows or the very good Gangs of London and make it worth your while. Personally, I’m not one to love a gangland series, so Fightland was more of a miss for me – I would have loved much more about the underworld of boxing and less about the drug trade. My hope is that, if there’s a second season, the series is able to get over the hump and really offer some originality into a pretty saturated realm of storytelling. But until then, this one is a skip.

Fightland is currently airing on Starz.