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
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.
