{"id":84667,"date":"2025-09-25T11:21:08","date_gmt":"2025-09-25T11:21:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/84667\/"},"modified":"2025-09-25T11:21:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-25T11:21:08","slug":"wildly-unfaithful-retelling-is-like-succession-with-shillelaghs-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/84667\/","title":{"rendered":"Wildly unfaithful retelling is like Succession with shillelaghs \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Netflix<\/a> has pitched House of Guinness<\/a> (Netflix, from Thursday) as a sort of Succession<\/a> with shillelaghs. It begins with the death in 1868 of Benjamin Guinness, grandson of the brewery\u2019s founder, Arthur Guinness. As with the acclaimed HBO<\/a> show, the story is driven by his dysfunctional children, all of whom have various designs on his beer empire. <\/p>\n

There are many negatives, so perhaps it is best to focus on the positives up top. First of all, the music is fantastic. An early \u201cFenian\u201d riot in Dublin is soundtracked by Kneecap\u2019s<\/a> Get Your Brits Out, a pairing so on the nose I could feel my nostrils climb up into my skull. Elsewhere, the score features such up and coming Irish artists as Fontaines DC<\/a>, Gilla Band, Shark School, Lankum<\/a>, The Scratch, Sprints, and others. <\/p>\n

Fontaines don\u2019t need the exposure. But how fantastic that \u2013 to pluck a random example \u2013 Gilla Band\u2019s weapons-grade post punk is about to be beamed into livingrooms across the globe. There is also an undeniable thrill of witnessing Irish history told in epic, budget fashion. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0James Norton on perfecting a Dublin accent for House of Guinness: \u2018I knew if I didn\u2019t work hard, I\u2019d be really exposed\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s about as good as it gets. One problem with House of Guinness is that Steven Knight<\/a>\u2019s understanding of Ireland\u2019s experiences of colonialism is rudimentary at best (he didn\u2019t even have to leave the UK \u2013 the series was filmed mainly in Liverpool). He pitches the struggle for independence as a battle between different kinds of Irish people. On one side are Dublin Metropolitan Police units with flint Dublin burrs, on the other, \u201cFenians\u201d who dress and speak like feral leprechauns. At no point in an eight-part series unfolding in a post-Act of Union Ireland do we encounter a single person with a British accent \u2013 what Americans might call \u201cburying the lede\u201d. <\/p>\n

Knight<\/a> is responsible for one of the worst television shows of all time in the form of the atrocious Peaky Blinders<\/a> \u2013 starring Cillian Murphy\u2019s<\/a> flat-cap and Nick Cave\u2019s<\/a> Red Right Hand and not much else (no man has ever loved anything so much as Knight does Murphy\u2019s hat). So there are obvious concerns now that he is getting his mitts on 19th-century Irish history with House of Guinness \u2013 a wildly unfaithful retelling of the adventures of the porter-fuelled Anglo-Irish dynasty at a time when Ireland was a powder-keg primed to detonate. <\/p>\n

He also has a stunning lack of appreciation for who the Anglo-Irish were and where they fit (or didn\u2019t) into Irish society. To Knight, all the Irish seem much the same \u2013 the Guinness dynasty and their peers are just that little bit posher. For instance, as played by Dublin actor Danielle Galligan, Lady Olivia Hedges, daughter of the Earl of Bantry, is depicted essentially as a middle-class Cork woman. <\/p>\n

Still, she and the rest of the cast do their best. James Norton<\/a> sounds like a steampunk Mr Tayto as the Guinness\u2019 consigliere Se\u00e1n Rafferty. As the sensible one in the Guinness family, Edward, played Louis Partridge (boyfriend of Olivia Rodrigo<\/a>), appears to have walked straight out of a Ross O\u2019Carroll-Kelly<\/a> spin-off. Forget the black stuff \u2013 Edward was born to chug Heinomites. There is also Anthony Boyle<\/a> as the closeted head of the family, Arthur Guinness, Jack Gleeson<\/a> as their illegitimate half-sibling, Byron Hughes, and Emily Bairns as Lady Anne Guinness. <\/p>\n

In one of the more unintentionally hilarious sequences, Ms Guinness visits a village in \u201cConnacht, Co Mayo\u201d and is shocked to discover that a famine took place several years earlier and that everyone speaks Irish. These and other scenes left me crying out for a nice cold, creamy pint of Beamish. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Netflix has pitched House of Guinness (Netflix, from Thursday) as a sort of Succession with shillelaghs. It begins…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":84668,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[18,117,7195,19,17],"class_list":{"0":"post-84667","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-eire","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-house-of-guinness","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84667"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84667\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/84668"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}