You may judge a show’s success by the number of imitators that follow: to see how much TV commissioners envied the popularity of Slow Horses, look at the recent uptick in wry dramas about spies and/or shambling outcasts who work in a grotty basement but get the job done. Another show with that status is Peaky Blinders, writer Steven Knight’s swaggering epic about a (real) Birmingham crime gang between the wars.
What’s unusual about the post-Blinders shows is that the author of the towering original has tended to write the pretenders to the throne himself: Knight sought to develop the formula earlier this year with A Thousand Blows, a series about a different historical crime gang, and with his new Netflix show House of Guinness, he seems to be mining the same seam. The family here is not a crime family: we are in Dublin in 1868, where Guinness is so ubiquitous that the unimaginably wealthy Guinness family run the city. But managing the factory that dominates the landscape is the fearsome Sean Rafferty (James Norton), an arch schemer whose currency is violence. He introduces himself by issuing a rallying call to the company workers, exhorting them to crush an anti-Guinness street protest then leading the way himself, gleefully swinging a hunk of hard factory iron.
Later on in episode one, when the Guinness cooperage is torched by malcontents, Rafferty walks into the blaze, impervious in a swishing long coat and with a clattering 21st-century rock soundtrack behind him, to sort it out. He is the steaming punk in a world where corruption outstrips the rule of law, where punches land with a merciless crunch, where chains clank, hessian chafes and pressure gauges are forever twitching into the red. The domineering patriarch of the Guinness dynasty, Benjamin, has just died, and none of his four adult children seem equipped to take over. This could be Rafferty’s moment.
Watch more than one episode of House of Guinness, however, and a realisation soon arrives: Rafferty may be an unstoppable force, but our focus slowly centres on the Guinness kids. This isn’t Peaky Blinders, the Irish prequel. It’s 19th-century Dublin’s answer to Succession. The big fella has died before it starts, but we still have three sons and a daughter whose lives have been ruined by the extreme blessings Dad’s evil genius has given them. As in Succession, or The Crown at its best, the show is alive to the fact that tragedy plus privilege still equals tragedy; it makes us feel the pain of the pampered, or at least be fascinated by it, even if we’re a step removed from it.
And what characters the Guinness quartet are, confidently drawn and wisely performed, powering a fine drama about people with flaws they can’t overcome, delusions of qualities they don’t possess, and weaknesses their foes will inevitably exploit. Arthur (Anthony Boyle) seems selfish enough to realise his dream of adding political power to his inherited financial might, but his superiority complex has made him impetuous and too quick to anger, and he is cursed by the times into which he has been born: his homosexuality is an open secret that could destroy him at any minute. A better bet for the business, then, might be little bro Edward (Louis Partridge), but his pragmatism masks an idealism that might not survive contact with the cold realities of commercialism.
Observing the filial power struggle is sister Anne, who is woefully overlooked by the family and slightly underserved by the drama, but who still provides House of Guinness with additional smarts and heart, thanks to a terrific turn by Emily Fairn, following up an unforgettable debut as lost soul Casey in The Responder. Then there is Benjamin Jr (Fionn O’Shea), who has succumbed to gambling and booze when we meet him – the only brother who has stopped pretending to be something he is not.
As the shouting, fighting and drawing-room tensions escalate, and as sex proves to be as much of a hindrance to clear thinking as money (the casting of Norton, pheromones fairly radiating from the screen, is a big help there), House of Guinness matures into a romp that you can hardly resist, especially when it makes such good use of its time and place. We are less than two decades on from the potato famine, and Ireland’s yearning for freedom is reaching breaking point: both are woven sensitively into the saga, making it an even richer study of the toxic rich – and making House of Guinness, for Steven Knight, a career peak.
• House of Guinness is on Netflix now
