The six-episode first season drops us straight into Deptford, Peckham and Bexley where five strangers find their blood disorder has mutated into a super-cell. Rapman (the sole writer, sharing directing duties with Sebastian Thiel) keeps the camera on the concrete: a courier late on rent, a nurse humiliated at work, a father dodging bailiffs, a teen dealer and a gang leader hunted by police. Their powers—time-slowing teleportation, telekinesis, super-strength, speed—emerge mid-shift, mid-row, mid-escape, never mid-monologue. The threat isn’t an alien sky-beam but a quietly funded surveillance unit that tags, traps and monetises Black bodies, weaponising stop-and-search as bait.
The tone is grime not glamour: night buses, tower-block stairwells, council-flat kitchens lit by phone screens, all scored to drill and gospel. Netflix green-lit the project in 2019 after HBO, ABC and FX passed; filming ran July 2022–April 2023, pandemic delays intact, on real South-London streets where locals double as extras and collateral damage.
Tosin Cole’s Michael carries the emotional through-line, desperate to rewrite the night his fiancée Dionne was taken, while Nadine Mills and Eric Kofi-Abrefa give the ensemble its bruised heart. A second season was confirmed August 2024, leaving the closing shot of a blood-red Thames skyline as the cliff-edge promise that the city itself might be the next character to wake up.
Production Details
Netflix / 2 Seasons / 7 Episodes / 2024 - Present
Created by: Rapman
Showrunner(s): Anna Ferguson, Steve Searle, Mouktar Mohammed
Writer(s): Rapman
Producer(s): Joanna CrowMark HedgesSheila Nortley
Main Cast
Tosin Cole as Michael Lasaki-Brown
Nadine Mills as Sabrina Clarke
Eric Kofi Abrefa as Andre Simpson
Calvin Demba as Rodney Cullen
Josh Tedeku as Tazer
Adelayo Adedayo as Dionne Ofori
Rayxia Ojo as Sharleen Clarke
Ky-Mani Carty as AJ Simpson
Michael Salami as Gabriel
Giacomo Mancini as Spud
Mickira Oji as Skreamer
Xavien Russell as Dots
