Steven Knight is the English screenwriter who created Peaky Blinders, and his new Netflix show, House of Guinness, has much of the same elements as that show: period Irish setting, big text translating Irish-language material into English, proper Irish donnybrooks set to anachronistic musical selections, characters dropping more f-bombs than their real-life counterparts ever would have, and even an amoral Tommy Shelby-like thug named Sean Rafferty (James Norton). The main difference is that this delves into the past of the world-famous Irish beer, and if you’re willing to overlook its myriad historical inaccuracies and inauthentic accents, it’s a lot of fun.
The story picks up in 1868, when Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness dies, leaving behind a highly successful brewery in Dublin for his four adult children. Rather than will the entire business to oldest son Arthur (Anthony Boyle) as expected, Sir Benjamin instead splits it between Arthur and his youngest and most capable son, Edward (Louis Partridge). Middle son Ben (Fionn O’Shea) is disinherited because he’s addicted to alcohol, opium, and gambling, while only daughter Anne (Emily Fearn) is cut off because she’s a married woman. Edward marvels at how the arrangement has managed to make each child equally unhappy.
It’s the setup for a brew with some intriguing ingredients floating free. Arthur’s homosexuality is a badly kept secret, and the whole family spends Episode 2 doing a frantic dance to marry him to a suitable woman to preserve Guinness’ reputation. He sullies it anyway, not through the gayness but rather by committing election fraud to win his father’s seat in Britain’s Parliament.
Meanwhile, despite his Protestant father’s history of supporting British rule of Ireland, Edward makes overtures toward the Irish nationalists, or Fenians, so that he can brew his beer in peace. This culminates in a remarkable scene in the third episode, as he invites Ellen Cochrane (Niamh McCormack), the brains behind the Fenians’ operations, to high tea at Dublin’s best hotel. While she determines to hold her head up under the stares of socialites who are all dressed more expensively than her, Edward draws out a metaphor for Ireland’s political situation by demonstrating the proper technique for pouring Guinness.
The scenes of Dublin’s high society holding balls and formal dances are all very The Age of Innocence, but the show turns into Gangs of New York in the streets, especially when Edward dispatches an illegitimate cousin (Jack Gleeson) to the Big Apple to expand Guinness’ business to America. Hard to say whether Gleeson is more relieved to be using his native Irish accent or not to be playing Joffrey Baratheon, but he brings some welcome floridity to this shady operative who delivers on his promises to sell the brew on American shores. He gets to be subtle, too, when he’s threatening Ellen’s idiot brother Patrick (Seamus O’Hara), who’s exiled to New York after torching one too many Guinness facilities and is initially too proud to funnel the Guinness’ money to the Fenians.
Patrick is at the center of the first season’s rather disappointing cliffhanger, as he returns to Dublin to try to assassinate Arthur during his second run at Parliament. We know that the real-life Arthur lived another 40 years after that point, and it would take a bold move by the show to kill off the character. Also, Rafferty’s romance with Arthur’s hard-swearing aristocratic wife (Danielle Galligan) comes out of nowhere. House of Guinness is much better at showing what attracts her to enter into her sexless marriage with Arthur, who likes her intelligence and her blunt way of speaking.
The splashy show does offer up some fine performances by its mostly Irish cast, even if the acting honors are snaffled up by English members like Norton as a Catholic fixer for the Guinnesses who has no qualms about throwing fellow Catholics’ bodies in the harbor. The same goes for Partridge — he’s the male lead from the Enola Holmes movies — as a progressive capitalist who installs a retirement plan for Guinness’ workers even though both Arthur and Rafferty think he’s insane for paying old men to do nothing. At the very least, the next time someone puts a glass of that famous dry stout in front of you, this show will make you look at it in a different light.
