House of Guinness

The Froth and the Fury

I’ve spent the better part of a week trying to decide if Steven Knight’s *House of Guinness* is a brilliant piece of historical television or simply a very expensive, eight-hour music video. Let’s be honest, Knight has a formula. You know it by now. He takes a piece of history, strips away the boring parliamentary debates, dresses everyone in impeccably tailored wool, and sets the whole thing to a bruising post-punk soundtrack. It worked for *Peaky Blinders*, and he’s applying the exact same alchemy to 1868 Dublin.

The opening minutes of the series tell you everything you need to know about the ride you’re on. We are at the funeral of Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness, the patriarch who built the world's most famous brewery. Mourners are marching in slow motion. Outside the gates, protestors are clashing with the factory enforcers. And underneath it all, the electric thrum of contemporary Irish rock bands like Fontaines D.C. and Kneecap shakes the floorboards. It’s absurd. It’s undeniably effective. But it also begs the question of whether we are watching history or just trying on its clothes.



This is essentially *Succession* in waistcoats. With the patriarch dead, his four children are left to carve up an empire. There’s Anne (Emily Fairn), marginalized by her gender; Benjamin Jr. (Fionn O'Shea), who spends the first season actively dissolving himself in a puddle of gambling debt and alcohol; and the two central pillars of the family feud, Arthur and Edward.

I couldn't look away from Anthony Boyle’s performance as the eldest son, Arthur. Boyle, who recently spent time dodging flak in *Masters of the Air*, leans into a sort of Byronic melancholy here. His Arthur is supposed to inherit the kingdom, but he's carrying a secret that would ruin him in Victorian society—he is gay, trapped in a marriage of convenience. There's a physical tension to Boyle’s acting. He holds his shoulders tight, his jaw clenched, like a man waiting for a trapdoor to open beneath him. When he finally lets his guard down in his clandestine romance with a warehouse worker, his sudden fragility is genuinely moving. It grounds the show's melodramatic impulses in something real and agonizing.



On the other side of the ledger is Louis Partridge as Edward, the younger brother who actually understands how the business runs. After years of playing the floppy-haired teen heartthrob in things like *Enola Holmes*, Partridge is trying something much stiffer here. His Edward is pragmatic, rigid, and deeply uncomfortable with human emotion. Watch the way Partridge sits in a chair during the boardroom scenes—spine perfectly straight, eyes calculating, hands resting precisely on his knees. He looks at his siblings not as family, but as liabilities to be managed. The friction between Arthur’s volatile passion and Edward’s cold ambition drives the engine of these first eight episodes.

And then, of course, there's James Norton. Playing the family’s head enforcer, Sean Rafferty, Norton stalks through the sepia-toned streets in a swishing long coat, dispensing violence and smoldering glances in equal measure. It's the kind of performance that knows exactly what genre it belongs in. The Guardian noted that his "pheromones fairly radiate from the screen," which is perhaps the most accurate description of a character I've read all year. Rafferty isn’t a real historical figure—Knight invented him to add some connective tissue between the wealthy elites and the working-class Fenian rebels—but he serves as the show's dark, charismatic center.



Whether you actually like *House of Guinness* might just depend on what passport you hold. British and American critics have largely eaten it up as a rollicking family drama. Irish critics, however, have not been so kind. The Irish Times famously mocked it as a "wildly unfaithful retelling" and likened Norton's brooding enforcer to a "steampunk Mr Tayto". They aren't wrong. Filmed mostly in Liverpool instead of Dublin, the series plays fast and loose with 19th-century Irish politics, often reducing complex historical trauma into a convenient backdrop for a family squabble.

I'm not sure this works as a historical document. Actually, I know it doesn't. But as a story about the rotting core of extreme wealth, it has a pulse. Knight knows how to build a world that feels tactile—you can practically smell the damp malt and the coal smoke. By the time the season wraps up, you realize you haven't learned a single thing about how stout is actually brewed. What you get instead is a surprisingly sad portrait of people who own the world but can't seem to buy their way out of their own heads.