Taboo: Tom Hardy’s Savage Masterpiece Still Haunts—and Divides—Eight Years Later

Eight years after its 2017 premiere, Taboo—the BBC and FX co-production starring Tom Hardy as the feral, vengeance-obsessed James Keziah Delaney—continues to stalk the cultural consciousness like the mud-smeared antihero at its center. Hailed upon release as “a masterpiece” by The Guardian and “the best show ever made” by feverish Reddit threads, the eight-episode limited series has aged into a paradox: a critical darling that still triggers walkouts, therapy sessions, and furious op-eds for its unflinching depictions of incest, slavery, and colonial rot.

Created by Hardy, his father Chips, and Steven Knight (Peaky Blinders), Taboo is set in 1814 London, where the Napoleonic Wars bleed into the boardrooms of the East India Company. Hardy’s Delaney—presumed dead in Africa, tattooed with tribal scars, and muttering in tongues—returns to claim a strip of land on the Pacific Northwest coast that could redraw the map of empire. What follows is a slow-burn fever dream of betrayal, necromancy, and corporate cannibalism, shot through with a nihilistic fury that makes Game of Thrones look like a tea party.

A Performance Carved in Bone and Rage

Hardy doesn’t act Delaney; he inhabits him. His voice is a guttural rasp, half-London dockworker, half-African shaman. His eyes—sunken, unblinking—seem to see ghosts in every shadow. Critics lost their minds: The Telegraph called it “the most magnetic performance since Brando in Apocalypse Now.” Even detractors admitted the sheer force of Hardy’s presence. One scene—Delaney devouring a raw pigeon heart while interrogating a trembling clerk—reportedly caused three crew members to faint during filming.

The Scenes That Scarred a Generation

Yet the praise is forever tethered to trauma. Episode 6’s incest revelation—Delaney and his half-sister Zilpha (Oona Chaplin) consummating a forbidden attraction in a thunderstorm-lit attic—remains one of television’s most divisive moments. The camera lingers on rain-lashed skin and whispered confessions of childhood violation, refusing to cut away. “It’s not gratuitous,” Knight defended in a 2017 Radio Times interview. “It’s the original sin that powers the entire tragedy.” Viewers disagreed: #CancelTaboo trended for 48 hours.

Then there’s the slavery. Delaney’s backstory—surviving a slave ship mutiny, learning Bantu sorcery from enslaved priests—unfurls in hallucinatory flashbacks that spare no horror. Whips crack in 4K. A child’s severed finger is used as a chess piece. The East India Company’s boardroom debates the “cost efficiency” of branding versus amputation. The New York Times praised the “unflinching historical reckoning,” but the British Board of Film Classification slapped an 18 certificate and a trigger warning longer than the Magna Carta.

A Gothic Fever Dream in Mud and Blood

Visually, Taboo is a nightmare painted by Goya. Cinematographer Mark Patten drowns London in sepia fog and Thames sludge. The soundtrack—composed by Max Richter—pulses with Gregorian chants, African drums, and the distant howl of chains. Production designer Tom Burton built a full-scale 1814 Wapping dockyard in Tilbury, complete with rotting whale carcasses and a functioning gallows. Hardy insisted on real mud: “I wanted to smell the empire’s decay.”

The supporting cast is a murderer’s row of British heavyweights. Jonathan Pryce oozes venom as East India chairman Sir Stuart Strange, his powdered wig barely containing his rage. David Hayman’s brace-toothed henchman Brace is equal parts butler and war criminal. Leo Bill’s wilting accountant Wilton provides the only comic relief—until he’s flayed alive in Episode 7.

Legacy: Masterpiece or Trauma Porn?

Taboo ended on a cliffhanger—Delaney sailing west with a cargo of gunpowder and ghosts—that still torments fans. Hardy has teased a second season “when the stars align and the mud is thick enough,” but FX’s parent company Disney remains skittish about the content. A 2023 petition with 1.2 million signatures demanded closure; counter-petitions accused the show of “glorifying colonial violence.”

Academics are split. Dr. Priya Patel’s Empire and Incest: Taboo’s Postcolonial Reckoning (Oxford Press, 2022) argues the series is “the most honest depiction of Britain’s original sins since Roots.” Conversely, media scholar Marcus Okonkwo’s viral TED Talk branded it “trauma porn for the Netflix age—exploitation masquerading as subversion.”

The Final Verdict

Love it or loathe it, Taboo refuses to be forgotten. It’s the rare period drama that smells of sweat, gunpowder, and moral rot. Hardy’s Delaney isn’t a hero or even an antihero—he’s a wound in human form, bleeding on everyone around him. As one Reddit user wrote in 2024, “I haven’t slept properly since Episode 4, but I’d watch it again in a heartbeat.”

Masterpiece? Undeniably. The best show ever made? Only if you can stomach the truth it drags screaming from the mud.

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