Review
House of
Guinness review – James Norton’s pheromones positively sizzle off the screen
With
smarts, heart and serious sex appeal, this fine drama from Peaky Blinders’
Steven Knight is an irresistible romp – like Succession, only over a booze
empire. Knight has never made a better show than this
Jack
Seale
Thu 25
Sep 2025 06.00 CEST
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
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