Saga

Netflix’s House of Guinness, the new 19th-century drama from Peaky Blinders and A Thousand Blows creator Steven Knight, knows the value of a big, splashy moment.

Its characters, the most central of whom are the scions of Ireland’s most famous ale-brewing family, do not simply go down the stairs when they can glide in slow-motion to the moody strains of an Irish rock soundtrack. They do not walk around building demolitions when they can sail through as explosions go off in the background, action-movie-style. They make impassioned declarations of love or fury, and trade metaphor-laden speeches; occasionally, when words fall short, they set literal fires.

What all of it amounts to, once the fizz has settled, is somehow both more and less substance than you might expect. If House of Guinness knows how to grab a viewer’s attention, it’s less concerned with shading in the nuances that might lend the series emotional heft to go with its epic sprawl and electric energy. But when a series is this good at keeping the good times flowing, it’s hard not to get a bit swept up in its veritable rivers of drama.

The story begins, as so many others have as of late, with a powerful and wealthy clan facing an apparent succession crisis. The year is 1868 and Benjamin Guinness, the richest man in the country, has just died, leaving his four squabbling adult children to try and carry on the family’s legacy.

As the eldest son, Arthur (Anthony Boyle, who seems so at home in the 19th century it’s a wonder he’s actually from the 21st) would seem Daddy’s most obvious heir — if not for his utter disinterest in the family trade and his outright desperation to escape the expectations of the family name. It’s pragmatic-to-a-fault youngest brother Edward (Louis Partridge) who possesses both the ambition and the aptitude to run the company, but not the assumption of primogeniture.

Middle son Benjamin (Fionn O’Shea) is the black sheep of the bunch, battling alcoholism, gambling addiction and a general lack of self-esteem. Rounding out the mourning quartet is their sister Anne (Emily Fairn), physically sickly, emotionally brittle and unequivocally devout. Both Anne and Benjamin are quickly disabused of any illusion that their father might have taken them seriously as contributors to the business, let alone potential successors.

As if the infighting weren’t enough, the Guinnesses are also beset by outside forces from seemingly every side of the cultural spectrum. The Irish independence-supporting Fenians, represented primarily by hotheaded oaf Paddy (Seamus O’Hara) and his more strategically minded sister Ellen (Niamh McCormack), loathe the family’s conservative unionist policies. Religious forces, spearheaded by an unpleasant Guinness uncle (Michael Colgan), decry the immorality of the booze they’re selling.

Tensions come to a head in the opening minutes of the Tom Shankland-directed premiere, as protesters from every camp converge upon the old man’s funeral procession, and hammer-wielding company men prepare to fight back. “The name’s Guinness. Of course there’ll be fucking trouble,” smirks brewery foreman and fixer Rafferty, whose theatrical tendencies are not so much performed by James Norton as savored like a juicy steak. Of course, he’s right.

But the fact that nothing truly disturbing happens in that first scene might be the first hint that House of Guinness is willing to pull its punches, for better and for worse. Succession this is not, at least when it comes to the brutally unflattering and emotionally punishing portrayal of the one-percent. These upper-crust elites are ones we’re meant, at the end of the day, to sympathize with and root for.

The show is by no means blind to the dark and sweeping social forces shaping the times, up to and including the extreme inequality that allows the Guinnesses to get ice shipped in special from Greenland while cholera-stricken villagers just a mile down the road struggle to find clean water. Nor is it entirely worshipful of the Guinnesses. Even as the clan get more involved in charity, or soften their previously firm unionist stance, the series makes a point of showing that they’re motivated as much by the promise of good PR as they are by a sincere desire to effect positive change.

Still, the show stops short of wrestling with either the characters’ complicity in injustice or their evolving feelings in any real detail. In contrast to the recent wave of shows and films painting the super-wealthy as greedy, cruel or plain stupid, the Guinnesses we follow are only ever truly guilty of obliviousness. Likewise, early hints at darker character flaws — like that Edward might become drunk on power or that Rafferty might have a sadistic streak — tend to dissipate as the characters grow or deepen.

In truth, a damning portrait of the family was probably never in the cards, considering the series counts among its executive producers actual Guinness descendant Ivana Lowell. And the choice to soften the characters as the eight-episode season goes on has the benefit of making them easy to feel for as each gets increasingly caught up in tragic love affairs. (I’ll leave the specifics for you to discover, but suffice it to say that a lawyer handling the family’s scandals jokes, “Infidelity. Sodomy. Lost love and random acts of violence. A more typical Dublin family would be hard to find.”)

But here, too, the choice to prioritize high-drama plot beats over incremental evolution yields mixed results. On one hand, the no-fat approach keeps the pacing brisk, and allows for thrilling shit-just-got-real moments like the introduction of Olivia (a dazzling Danielle Galligan), Anthony’s appropriately aristocratic but shockingly no-bullshit future wife.

On the other, it keeps us at an arm’s length. Benjamin and Anne, particularly, become characters who resurface only to show us how much they’ve changed offscreen, without allowing us to see how or why they’ve transformed so much. And more than one load-bearing romance centers around characters who seem inexorably drawn together mainly because the plot demands it, not because we understand precisely what it is that either party finds so beguiling in the other.

That the drama nevertheless makes it work more often than not — that I found myself “aw”-ing over Anthony’s heartbreak or tutting at Benjamin’s self-destructive foibles or cheering at a bold but staggeringly ill-advised choice made by Olivia late in the season — is a testament, again, to the series understanding the power of a big moment. As firmly as its characters believe in God or commerce or Irish independence, House of Guinness places its faith in the notion that a kiss or a speech or a punch, delivered with enough style and passion, can sell just about anything. More often than not, it’s right.