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Like a pint of stout, House of Guinness requires a bit of patience. It finds ever-busy Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight turning his pen to the 1860s and the travails of Dublin’s wealthy brewing family, who are undergoing a succession crisis just as Ireland is experiencing ever more urgent and organised calls for independence. The first two episodes do it no favours, and set it up as an insipid historical slog, though with perseverance, it does eventually settle into something a little more smooth and robust.
As often with Knight, the ingredients are combustible. Though he is a prolific and varied writer (his dreamy films with director Pablo Larraín are a world away from this, for example), he has a playbook that he often applies to television. For one thing, there is anachronistic music, with current Irish bands Fontaines DC and Kneecap soundtracking big 19th-century dust-ups between angry men who love to fight and blow things up. When characters speak Irish, the translation is stamped on the screen, in the style of Knight’s second world war series SAS: Rogue Heroes. As there, we get a cheeky disclaimer — “this fiction is inspired by true stories” — and plucky women making waves in the worlds of men.
In this case, however, Knight struggles to bring it all together, and in its early episodes Guinness has none of the sense of fun that his earlier series used as rocket fuel. It begins with the coffin of the richest man in Ireland, Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness, making its way out of the brewery on which he grew the family’s fortune. As for the future, his four children will have to wait to see what his will dictates, though each is unsuitable to take it over, in their own way. Arthur (Anthony Boyle) is the natural heir, though his time in London has left him with a soft English accent and plenty of sexual secrets to hide. The rigorous Edward (Louis Partridge) is overlooked and efficient, but his dealings with the sisterly brains behind the republican Fenian Brotherhood may well lead him to troubled waters. Benjamin (Fionn O’Shea) is a drunk with heavy gambling debts, and Anne (Emily Fairn) has the misfortune of having been born female.
It presents, then, as yet another example of the miserable rich scrabbling to work out their place in the world. Factory foreman Sean Rafferty (James Norton) is the Guinnesses’ fixer, and he knows where the bodies are buried, having buried a fair few of them himself. But his menace is slightly unconvincing, the family’s plight is hard to take seriously, and the republicans are drawn cartoonishly. Knight loves an underdog, but it takes too long for the underdogs to surface. And while the Guinness name may be “cursed”, as Arthur has it, they’re hardly shovelling coal into the furnaces.
It isn’t until the third episode that the series begins to find a spark, when Arthur is introduced to a witty young aristocrat, Lady Olivia Hedges (Danielle Galligan), who manages almost to shock the life out of poor old Aunt Agnes (Dervla Kirwan). There, at last, it locates its own character: a little soapy, a little Downton Abbey, even, but with a touch more grit, dirt and revolution. It just takes its time to get going.
★★★☆☆
On Netflix now
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