[COLUMN] House of Guinness Leaves a Bitter Aftertaste | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for the new Netflix series House of Guinness, right down to the season’s closing shot. If you’re looking for a quick review, I did not care for the series; it felt like getting a concussion, all of the pain of Guinness and none of the pleasure. However, if you are going to watch it, feel free to bookmark and come back. 

Around midway through the first season of House of Guinness, the new Netflix stream show from Steven Knight that offers a “fiction inspired by true stories” about the famous Irish brewing dynasty, young stout heir Edward Guinness (Louis Partridge) decides to impart a lesson on politics to his lover and young Fenian rebel Ellen Cochrane (Niamh McCormack). Naturally, he offers this lecture on political theory through a strained metaphor involving two bottles of the black stuff.

“There is a particular technique when it comes to pouring Guinness,” Edward explains, with the care that one expects from a modern “buy-o-pic.” The key, Edward says, is not to pour the bottle all at once. The glass should settle for a moment. “I call it the Guinness minute,” he offers. He elaborates, “These two half-poured glasses of Guinness represent the state of Ireland.” Edward sees his nation as a country “in need of time to reflect”, where progress is to be made “slowly, carefully, evenly.”

This moment reveals a lot about House of Guinness. On the surface, the show owes a lot to Knight’s other period series, Peaky Blinders. This is evident from its opening moments, which find the family’s resident ruffian, Sean Rafferty (James Norton), strolling through the brewery lit by flames as he amasses a mob to accompany the hearse carrying the deceased Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness. “Each of you grab a means of persuasion,” he orders. “Remove all obstacles with a firm hand.”

This influence makes sense. Peaky Blinders was a massive success on Netflix, to the point that the streaming service is co-producing the upcoming movie. House of Guinness has very clearly been brewed as Netflix’s own homegrown answer to Peaky Blinders, a sordid and sexy period soap opera with enough violence and sex to hold the attention of a younger audience alienated from more traditional period fare like Downton Abbey. It’s a crude calculation, but a pragmatic one.

However, House of Guinness also owes a surprising amount to Succession. The entire series is built around the heirs to a vast fortune trying to navigate their inheritance. As in Succession, there are four children caught in this struggle: three boys and one girl. Like Kendall (Jeremy Strong), the de facto leader of the children, Edward, is the second eldest of the bunch. Like Conn (Alan Ruck), the eldest brother Arthur (Anthony Boyle) seeks a career in politics that is threatened to be derailed by folly.

Like Shiv (Sarah Snook), their sister Anne (Emily Fairn) yearns to be taken seriously as the only girl. “Do you think he knew about me?” Anne asks Edward as the pair mourn their father. “You know, that I am capable of things? That I am not this lady ministering and swishing and looking down from great height?.” Anne even has a romance with Rafferty, the family’s lower-status factotum, recalling Shiv’s relationship to Tom (Matthew Macfadyen). Like Roman (Kieran Culkin), the youngest son Benjamin (Fionn O'Shea) is an unstable joke.

While the show’s visual language and needle drops of bands like Kneecap or The Scratch owe a lot to Peaky Blinders, the influence of Succession is keenly felt in House of Guinness’ score. At various points, often in scenes of conflict between Edward and Arthur, Ilan Eshkeri’s soundtrack owes a lot to Nicholas Britell’s work on Succession, seeming to layer a techno bassline over a violin and piano score. Succession has been a touchstone in press coverage of the series.

For all the aesthetics that it borrows from Peaky Blinders, House of Guinness is much closer in subject matter to Succession simply because it focuses on a family that are effectively billionaires. Almost every time that a significant amount of money is mentioned on-screen, a caption appears to help the audience adjust for inflation, to understand that the family is casually throwing around hundreds of millions of pounds. “Money wins,” to quote Succession.

However, there is one crucial difference between Succession and House of Guinness, and it speaks to a fatal flaw with the new streaming series. Succession understood that its wealthy family were all monsters and their very existence made the world a worse place. As sympathetic as the audience could be to characters like Kendall or Roman in the moment, the show always understood that this concentration of power and wealth in the hands of an elite was inherently destructive.

In contrast, House of the Guinness understands its central figures to be heroes. They are not entirely selfless – in fact, they are often presented as pragmatic and cynical – but they are heroes nonetheless. They may act in the best interests of the Guinness brand, but the best interests of the Guinness brand inevitably overlap with the best interests of the country. House of Guinness presents its oligarchs as educated, compassionate and reasonable figures. Edward introduces an old-age pension for his staff. Anne is so moved by the poverty in the Irish countryside that she insists the company donate a portion of its profits to charity.

House of Guinness begins in 1868. It is set in an Ireland in the midst of a revolutionary struggle against the British ruling class, a struggle that will pave its way to the Easter Rising in 1916, the War of Independence in 1919 and the Irish Civil War in 1922. As one of the wealthiest families in the country, the Guinness dynasty was inevitably intertwined with this fraught political and cultural moment. However, House of Guinness maintains a weird and insistent distance from the specifics of the conflict.

Against this backdrop, Edward Guinness preaches something close to apolitical impartiality. “In the future, we will see both sides of the Home Rule debate,” he assures Arthur. “For now, we are in the middle. Our concern is the people.” It’s a bizarre fantasy of Irish political history, one that suggests the wellbeing and autonomy of the Irish people can be academically divorced from their desire to live free of British oppression.

There is an interesting story to be told there, about capitalist interests intertwining with colonial power struggles. It makes sense for Edward to want to keep his family at a remove from the struggle for Irish liberation, but it is a pragmatic and self-interested choice. There might be a better and more compelling version of House of Guinness willing to unpick and explore that choice, to dwell in the luxury that Edward Guinness enjoys to place himself above a nation’s path to self-determination.

However, House of Guinness doesn’t portray this apolitical stance as amoral. The show goes out of its way to be sympathetic to the Guinness family. While the show acknowledges Arthur’s fidelity to the Union – his horror at the rebranding of the company with the harp as “a symbol of Catholic Ireland”, his allegiance to the Tory Party, and even a fleeting reference to his friendship with British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli – the show is reluctant to delve too deeply into the family’s sympathies to Britain. The Anglo- side of the Anglo-Irish dynasty is largely silent.

While House of Guinness spends a lot of time on Edward’s donations to the Fenians fighting for Irish independence, the show never acknowledges Arthur’s financial support of the Irish Unionist Alliance. While the series devotes an entire subplot to Edward’s romance of Fenian radical Ellen, Arthur’s good friend (and Guinness drinker) Disraeli never appears. While the show splits time between Dublin and New York, it pays scant attention to the family’s ties to London.

The British occupation of Ireland is presented as an abstract force in House of Guinness. It is never given a face. When a bullet is delivered to the family from “the Dublin poor”, the family briefly considers the possibility that it might have been sent by aggrieved unionists, but the thought is not seriously entertained. The family’s biggest obstacles are homegrown, like local crime lord Bonnie Champion (David Wilmot) or rebel Patrick Cochrane (Seamus O'Hara).

It is perhaps worth acknowledging here that House of Guinness is a British production. It is written by Steven Knight, a British writer. It features a predominantly British primary cast, including Partridge in the lead role and a stage Irish accent from James Norton that would have been unforgivable at the height of Paddysploitation 1990s. It was shot primarily in Manchester and Liverpool, in England. It is a very British television show about a very Irish institution.

This perhaps explains the show’s weird politics concerning Irish independence. British media has often struggled with depictions of Irish history. In 2006, The Sun complained that Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley had been “designed to drag the reputation of [their] nation through the mud.” The release of famine westerns like Black ’47 or Arracht over the past decade prompted The Guardian to complain that “Brit bashing is in vogue in Ireland.” This blind spot extends other British colonial legacies, as demonstrated by some of the reaction to the recent Indian blockbuster RRR.

House of Guinness lacks the self-awareness that made Succession so compelling. Setting aside the particulars of its historical setting, the show feels like a work of “enlightened centrism”, a belief in moderation as a political virtue. House of Guinness presents the central family as heroic for approaching a “softly, softly” approach to improving the material wellbeing of their country, contrasting their apolitical charity work with the unruly politics of the revolutionaries around them.

The problem, of course, is that it was those revolutionaries who eventually freed Ireland. For decades, the country’s aristocracy advanced a politically moderate case for “Home Rule”, limited autonomy from Britain. However, this self-determination was always conditional on the good will of the British. Home Rule would have granted Ireland some governance over national concerns, but no self-determination in foreign affairs. The British agreed to enact it in 1914, but suspended it at the outbreak of the First World War. It would take the action of revolutionaries to earn Ireland true independence.

By largely eliding the realities and the horrors of the British occupation of Ireland, House of Guinness is able to rather calculatedly position its family as the reasonable compromise between what it perceives as the extremes of political thought. It feels like a show earnestly concerned about political polarization. “We need both sides of the Irish divide to see us as a bridge,” Anne explains. As with a good pint of Guinness, the key is to let things settle. The problem, of course, is that it’s very difficult to convincingly mount a “both sides” case for the colonial rule of Ireland, particularly more than a century after Irish independence.

This comes to a head in the finale, which unironically presents billionaire Arthur Guinness, who ended his previous term prematurely due to corruption charges, as something close to an Irish Abraham Lincoln. Inspired by his trip to New York, Byron Hughes (Jack Gleeson) even goes so far as to suggest that Arthur should grow a beard to better evoke Lincoln. While this initially seems like a joke, the season builds to a cliffhanger built around Patrick’s attempt to assassinate Arthur - what feels like a point about political violence.

It turns out that those pesky working-class Irish rebels don’t appreciate the work of their social betters. “Our philanthropy in this city has bought us both Catholic and Liberal supporters,” Edward protests. Rafferty warns him, “And that is what your enemies fear the most. Kindness to make the status quo bearable.” The problem isn’t the material conditions that created poverty or the exploitation of a nation by a disinterested foreign power, the danger comes from those who seek to change the status quo rather than soften it.

There is something deeply cynical and insidious about the paternalistic vision of oligarchy offered by House of Guinness, “Daddy Warbucks Knows Best.” Unfolding in a world where it seems like organized government has completely abandoned the working class, House of Guinness suggests that the disenfranchised would do well to turn to their patrician business owners for moral guidance and material aid rather than daring to dream of a new political order. This leaves a decidedly bitter taste, and it certainly doesn’t go down easy.