House Of Guinness

Streaming on: Netflix

Episodes viewed: 8 of 8

At first sip, you might take House of Guinness for a 19th century spin on Succession. It concerns a powerful and wealthy family steering its way through turbulent times (specifically the struggle for Irish independence and the Bible-thumping threat of the temperance movement), with a quartet of offspring (three sons and one daughter — snap!) trying to prevail in the shadow of their towering patriarch. However, given that it’s Steven Knight pulling the pints, the show in fact has far more in common with his hit Brummie gangster series Peaky Blinders — to the point where it feels very much like a spiritual prequel.

These first eight episodes are festooned with Knight hallmarks: repeated slow-mo shots of an imposing figure strutting through a blazing industrial hellscape; a brazenly anachronistic soundtrack (with the likes of Kneecap and Fontaines D.C. on the jukebox); a gleefully effing-and-blinding script; and a generally grimy, sepia-tinged aesthetic. Of course, Knight’s dealing here with a family starting out at the top of the heap rather than down in the gutter, so the scrappy back-alley action is immediately contrasted by scenes set in more opulent environs: the ballrooms, tea rooms and mansions of Dublin, not to mention a castle or two in the lands beyond, where ladies must be courted if legacies are to be secured. So at times it also feels a little like an Irish-accented Downton Abbey.

Knight has gathered a solid cast to fill out the siblings and their various spouses, mistresses, hirelings and rivals, but while the first episode suggests equal narrative weighting for the four Guinness scions, the show’s really mostly concerned with the two eldest brothers: Arthur (Anthony Boyle), a gallivanting toff who’s expected to go into politics but is a (necessarily) closet homosexual, and Edward (Louis Partridge), a cold fish with big commercial ambitions, who also falls for exactly the wrong kind of woman. Much of this first season pings between the two, and their affairs of the heart and business, with far fewer sparks of rivalry than you might expect or hope for.

What House of Guinness notably lacks is a lynchpin character (and performance) to really draw us in. For all the Peaky-ness, is has no full-on Tommy Shelby/Cillian Murphy equivalent. The closest we get is James Norton as the intimidating and wily family fixer/foreman Rafferty (an entirely fictional character), who does all the Guinness’ dirty work. Norton brings a much-needed swig of swaggering charm to the mix, but he is merely a supporting player. For now, at least. As the finale’s hyperbolic cliffhanger ending makes clear, this is very much to be continued. So Norton will hopefully have a lot more to do in Season 2 than just walk menacingly through further fiery hellscapes.