Top Boy is an anomaly. It’s been part of popular culture for over a decade, yet less than 30 episodes have been released. It’s acclaimed by critics and hip-hop artists like Drake (who eventually became an executive producer), but it was canceled and sat dormant for a couple of years before being revived. Still, the most confusing part about Top Boy is the order in which it should be watched.
Netflix will release the third and final season of Top Boy on Sept. 7th, but the number might be off depending on when you first got into the show. Why aren’t there five seasons? How many episodes are there supposed to be in a given season? Is Top Boy: Summerhouse a spin-off? You aren’t the only one who’s confused. Let’s break down the franchise so you’re all caught up for the finale.
Top Boy: Summerhouse is not a new show or a spin-off focusing on different characters. It’s actually the show’s first two seasons, back when it aired on the British network Channel 4. The seasons aired between 2011 and 2013 and consisted of four episodes each. There were plans for a third season, but Channel 4 pulled the plug on the show in 2014, and it sat dormant for the next three years.
Top Boy was then picked up by Netflix in 2017. Narratively speaking, the revival picked up where the previous two seasons picked up, but it was billed as the first season of a new show rather than the third season of an ongoing show. To avoid confusion, Netflix took the Channel 4 seasons and rebranded them under the name Top Boy: Summerhouse. This makes Summerhouse a prequel but a wholly necessary one, as it sets up the characters we spend time with in Netflix’s Top Boy.
Is Top Boy: Summerhouse a prequel?
Michael Ward, who joined Top Boy in 2017, talked about the differences between the Channel 4 and Netflix iterations of the show during an interview with Dazed Digital. “There are new stories, and the main thing is that I think back then youngers had more respect for elders, but now that’s lost,” he theorized. “Youngers in real life now do not care what olders have to say. So when Dushane and that come back trying [to] operate how they used to, it’s not like that because youngers are really ruthless out here in these streets. That’s the main difference for me.”
Ward has a point. There is definitely a shift in the Netflix era of the show, especially when you factor in the budget and the influence of having a celebrity like Drake championing it on social media, but it’s absolutely imperative to watch Top Boy: Summerhouse before you dig into Top Boy. While their billing denotes a significant break, the two shows are parts of the same whole, and many fans simply look at Top Boy as having five seasons in total rather than two seasons of Summerhouse and three namesake seasons.
Watch them in the order they were released, and you’ll get the full, phenomenal television experience that creator Ronan Bennett intended.