By The Week UK

Copyright theweek

“Swagger, menace, a modern soundtrack, actors walking in slow motion while wearing stylish hats…” Yes, Steven Knight, the creator of “Peaky Blinders”, is back with a new drama, only this time it’s not a gangland tale set in prewar Birmingham, but a “Succession”-style piece, loosely based on fact, set in 19th-century Dublin, said Anita Singh in The Daily Telegraph. It opens in the year 1868, and Benjamin Guinness, who built his family’s enterprise into a brewing behemoth, has just died. He has left behind three sons and a daughter, and it’s not clear who stands to take the reins of the business.

The series begins with a mass brawl as the brewery’s Catholic and Protestant workers prepare to smash their fists against each other during the funeral cortege, said James Jackson in The Times. You may slightly roll your eyes as the music of Fontaines D.C. blasts out, and you realise you’re in for another “rip-roaring” costume drama. “But then something happens. With a dash of ‘Downton’ as well as ‘Succession’, the mix of familial scheming and wider political ruptures (in this case anti-British hostility) starts to coalesce” into something that is dark and really quite quaffable.

The family’s plight is hard to take seriously and the republicans “are drawn cartoonishly”, said Rebecca Nicholson in the Financial Times. It’s all “a little soapy” – and, like a pint of stout, it “requires a bit of patience”. The first two episodes are a bit of a slog, but “House of Guinness” eventually settles into “something a little more smooth and robust”.