Written and created for BBC One by Steven Knight and directed by Paul Whittington, the series follows a group of young people in the early 1980s in Birmingham and Coventry.
[2] Knight and producer Nick Angel began working in November 2020 with the production companies Kudos and Stigma on a project set during the early 1980s UK music scene.
[4] For Knight, it is a project he has said is more personal work to him than his previous Birmingham based television series Peaky Blinders, with Knight describing This Town as his “love letter” to the area he grew up in and “an era I loved through and know well and [involving] characters who I feel I grew up with.”[5] Michelle Dockery, David Dawson and Nicholas Pinnock were announced to be cast in November 2022, it was also revealed that original music would be written specifically for the series by Dan Carey and Kae Tempest.
[14][15] It also features the original classic hits of artists such as UB40, the Specials, Toots and the Maytals, Blondie, Desmond Dekker & the Aces, the Clash, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and the Selecter.
Carey also worked with the actors, who had varying levels of musical skills, to play the instruments and sing the songs as a band, eventually named Fuck the Factory.
The website's critics consensus reads, "Steven Knight's This Town has a shapelessness that will sag some viewers' investment, but it holds intriguing insights into its specific cultural milieu.