Steven Knight Brews a Worthy Successor to Peaky Blinders with House of Guinness

Steven Knight has kept himself plenty busy since his breakthrough drama—the Cillian Murphy-led period gangland series Peaky Blinders—wrapped its final season back in 2022. He’s launched multiple new series, tackling subjects as diverse as the origins of the British ​​Army Special Air Service (Rogue Heroes), the 1980s Birmingham music scene (This Town), Victorian-era bare-knuckle boxing (A Thousand Blows), and modern-day spycraft (The Veil). But while all of these shows contain many of Knight’s most familiar visual and narrative trademarks as a storyteller and showrunner, none have managed to feel quite the same, tonally speaking, as his sprawling, shifting saga of the Shelby family. Until now. 

House of Guinness certainly shares many similarities with Knight’s most famous project. A story of complicated family dynamics, ambition, and legacy set in a city that’s a fully formed character in its own right, the drama grounds the struggles of its main characters in the social, economic, and political issues of the era. There’s plenty of violence, a soundtrack full of wildly anachronistic musical choices, and a prodigious amount of excellent outerwear. And though the characters’ social positions could not be more different—at least at the start of their respective series—the Guinness siblings are certainly just as scrappy and immoral as any of the Shelbys, though their enormous wealth allows them to hide that fact more easily.

But while the show feels like a spiritual successor to Knight’s most well-known property, House of Guinness is also very much its own thing. Based on real historical figures and a brand that’s as famous today as it ever was, the show mixes capitalist scheming, political intrigue, and public philanthropy with family rivalries, ill-advised romantic affairs, and public scandal. (The comparisons to HBO’s Succession in the lead-up to the show’s debut have been both frequent and fair.) While none of its characters are quite as dark or tortured as Tommy Shelby, each Guinness carries their own share of secrets, and faces similar struggles to find a place for themselves in a world that sees them as little more than the fact of their birthrights. 

Set predominantly in Dublin and steeped in Irish identity, the series begins with the death of Benjamin Lee Guinness in 1868. Grandson of Guinness founder Arthur, Benjamin was primarily responsible for turning the family business into a household name and expanding the brewery at St. James Gate into one of the largest in the world. He left an enormous fortune behind, and the initial question facing the family is how the estate will be divided among his four children: Eldest son Arthur (Anthony Boyle), a snob who has little interest in life in Dublin or the family business; Edward (Louis Partridge), an idealistic overachiever who dreams of expanding the Guinness empire even further; Benjamin (Finn O’Shea), a complete mess whose sole personality trait appears to be that he’s a drunk; and Anne (Emily Fairn), the capable and overlooked sister who is largely the glue that holds her family together. But when their father’s will contains some unforeseen surprises, the fortunes of all four siblings take a sharp and unexpected turn.

The will decrees that Arthur and Edward must run the brewery together, and that neither can be free of it without forfeiting all claim to their share of the Guinness fortune. Benjamin, deemed untrustworthy with the temptations of wealth, is given only a controlled monthly stipend. Poor Anne, presumed now to be her husband’s problem, gets nothing save access to various family estates—provided, of course, that Arthur says it’s okay. (Spoiler alert: It turns out that Benjamin was kind of an enormous jerk.) None of the Guinness siblings takes this particularly well, and what follows is the story of how they must all learn to adapt to their father’s posthumous wishes and the burdens of living with his legacy, for both good and ill. 

House of Guinness is a story of big swagger and smaller, more genuine moments. As Edward plots to expand Guinness distribution in America, Arthur runs for his father’s seat in Parliament, and Anne takes tentative steps to reshape the Guinness reputation through charitable activities. The conditions of life in mid-nineteenth-century Ireland present the family with plenty of external problems: A vocal temperance movement hostile to the very business that made the Guinness fortune, rising tensions between the prosperous Protestant elite and the Catholic poor, the growing Irish nationalism movement, represented by the Fenian Brotherhood, that wants to throw off the yoke of English rule. But the show is at its best as a study of toxic family dynamics and the perils of public expectation. (Perhaps on some level, Benjamin has it right after all—he’s the only Guinness not actively pretending to be something he isn’t.)