How Brassic became the unlikely jewel of Sky TV

It has been on our TV screens for five years, but Brassic has never been bigger than it is right now. The Sky comedy show has won an army of new fans since its first four series arrived on Netflix UK in August, with old fans also returning to binge-watch the show all over again.

This presents a new lease of life for a show that was rumoured to be on the chopping block at Sky earlier this year. Then, it was renewed for a seventh series, before the sixth has even begun airing. So why is Brassic suddenly a hot commodity?

Brassic takes its name from the Cockney rhyming slang phrase "boracic lint", meaning "skint". The show is the brainchild of actor Joseph Gilgun — best known as Woody in the This Is England series — and Bafta-winning writer Danny Brocklehurst, whose telly pedigree includes Shameless and, more recently, buzzy Netflix thriller Fool Me Once.

The series takes place in the fictional Northern town of Hawley, inspired by Gilgun's own experiences in his Lancashire hometown Chorley. He plays the small-time crook Vinnie O'Neill, who leads a ragtag gang of characters including Michelle Keegan's Erin, Damien Molony's Dylan, and Tom Hanson's Carid in various criminal misdeeds.

Read more: Brassic S5 review: Sky comedy hits new heights (Yahoo Entertainment)

Brassic won itself a lot of fans among both viewers and critics in its early days, bringing a sweary, boisterous, and colourful style to the small screen. Brocklehurst and Gilgun both have form for telling memorable working-class stories on TV and so it's no surprise that they were able to turn the simple premise of Brassic into one of Sky's most-watched shows.

Over the years, Brassic has won awards from both the Royal Television Society and the Writers' Guild of Great Britain, while Gilgun has received four Bafta nominations for his lead performance. It now spans five series, with the sixth coming this year, and it aired its first Christmas special in 2023, starring Greg Davies and Imelda Staunton alongside the usual cast.

But everything changed for Brassic earlier this month when the first four series of the show arrived on Netflix. In many ways, it's the perfect marriage between show and streaming platform. Brassic is a pacy and energetic show which, in its first series, had episodes between 30 and 45 minutes long. It's tailor-made for the sort of weekend binge session that Netflix encourages its audience towards.

Read more: 'Comedy gold' Michelle Keegan drama tops Netflix charts (Manchester Evening News)

Netflix also, quite simply, provides a much bigger audience than Sky. It especially opens up the sort of teenage/young adult audience who can't afford a hefty Sky subscription, but spend hours watching Netflix on their iPad. Suddenly, they have access to four series of a very fun comedy show with a youth-orientated feel to it.

In short, audiences who are sat in front of their telly looking for something new to watch will often turn to Netflix as their first port of call. Even those who are Sky subscribers will be far more likely to watch a show if it's served to them as a suggestion by the Netflix algorithm. In old-school terms, it's a shop window with much greater footfall.

Read more: Brassic star Joe Gilgun: 'It's a nightmare, not being in control of your own emotions' (Sky News)

It's also significant that watching Brassic on Netflix is a fundamentally different experience to watching it on Sky. Anyone who pays for a standard Netflix subscription will be able to watch the show without adverts, which is not the case on the standard version of Sky or NOW. Even for devoted Brassic fans, a binge-watch is far more appetising if it can happen without advert interruption.

Netflix is certainly driving Brassic to new levels of fandom, which makes the deal to license the show a smart move from Sky. The TV company will be hoping that new fans hooked on the first four series will sign up for Sky or NOW in order to watch the fifth series and the upcoming sixth, which is due to arrive in September 2024.

Watch: Trailer for Brassic series six

Brassic has never been bigger than it is right now, which makes Sky's decision to green-light another series look like a very smart one. It's an ideal show for the streaming era and, with its new Netflix connection, it's finally finding an audience outside of its devoted fanbase.

These guys are anything but skint now.

Brassic series 6 will debut on Sky and NOW in September 2024.

This article originally appeared on Yahoo TV UK at https://uk.news.yahoo.com/brassic-comedy-sky-tv-netflix-124214590.html