‘House of Guinness’ Episode 2 Recap: My Brother’s Keeper

It’s the damnedest thing. I’m sitting here watching the second episode of House of Guinness and thinking “Huh, this seems much stronger to me than the first episode, somehow. Less showy and blunt, more thoughtful, better dialogue, better lighting, an altogether tighter thing.” Great news, right? But then I thought, “Wait, why does this seem familiar?” It’s because the exact same thing happened with writer-creator Steven Knight’s last period piece about 19th-century dirty deeds among people with pretty accents, A Thousand Blows. 

Back then, I wrote that “Series premieres, even of very good shows, often suffer from what I call ‘pilot-itis.’ It’s a tendency to go a bit big and braod in hopes of catching and capturing the audience’s attention.” That’s especially true of the House of Guinness debut, which introduced the players and their personalities and motivations with all the subtlety of a kid plopping her favorite action figures down on the floor before playing with them. 

It’s the playing that seems to interest Knight more than the setting-up. All of a sudden he’s having Aunt Agnes lament to her headstrong niece, who neither wants to play matchmaker for her brothers nor be married herself, “Oh, Anne, you’re a wave crashing against a rock, made up of gold bands and diamond engagement rings.” You’ve got Arthur, who earlier that day was dumped by his boyfriend Michael (Foundation‘s Cassian Bilton) in a botanical garden, cryptically telling his brother and their body man Rafferty “My peace was shattered today, beside a water lily.” 

In the first episode, only Ben the junkie and Rafferty the rake were permitted this kind of lyricism, and coming from them it seemed more like a character defect than anything else. Once everyone gets in on the act, you start achieving some of that Deadwood magic, where characters of low character speak in high poetry.

Having established the show’s premise in episode one, we now move on to its central dilemma. In dividing his estate between his four children — in addition to the brewery and a fortune in cash, he had more real-estate holdings than any of the siblings were aware — he manages to make all four unhappy. Arthur inherits the brewery, as expected, but only half of it. The other half goes to his brother Edward, which sounds good at first since he wanted it, but the will includes a stipulation that if either brother quits the brewery business, he’ll lose everything else, too. 

Arthur is left in control of the wealth and the holdings. Anne is told to be content with her drip of a husband; she’s allowed to make use of any of the properties, but at Arthur’s discretion. Benjamin is given nothing at all, save for a lecture the show fades out as Benjamin staggers through the streets in a rage. They’re all pretty much miserable.

I say “pretty much” because Edward’s an exception. He’s not thrilled about the power-sharing arrangement with Arthur, of course, and I think he may have preferred things go differently with Anne and Benjamin as well. But having trained for this moment for five years, he takes the reins with gusto — giving orders, trying to arrange appropriate (and in Arthur’s case, discreet) marriages, providing Anne with various make-work tasks, ordering Rafferty to stop fucking her, and on and on. 

“Dear God, Edward, how power electrifies you!” Arthur marvels after Edward bullies their butler, Mr. Potter, for covering up a stain rather than cleaning it. “It’s like there’s a narcotic in you, suddenly.” The real high Edward’s chasing, though, is America, which you may remember as a once-prosperous democracy. Guinness senses a growth market there, beginning in New York. (Go to literally any bar and you’ll see how right he was.)

The real problem he faces is Arthur. After doing a little digging, and making use of the disgruntled Benjamin, both the Fenians and their gangster contact Bonnie Champion know Arthur is gay. (I was half-convinced he was something actually bad, like a serial killer.) All Bonnie wants is a payoff to keep his mouth shut; he himself owns establishments that cater to that clientele, which indeed is how he can back up his accusations against Arthur. 

The Fenians are trickier. Rafferty spends the whole episode beating and torturing his way to the truth of their involvement in the fire at the cooperage the night before, but he recognizes that of the two Cochrane siblings who lead the local Irish Republican Brotherhood, sister Ellen’s the brains of the outfit. Her idea of blackmail isn’t to extort money for the revolution — it’s to force the Protestant Arthur to become a voice for Irish independence in Parliament. Edward’s apparently impressed enough to arrange a face-to-face meeting with Ellen, though after seeing his psychotic look in the final shot of the episode, it’s not a face I’d want to face.

In addition to lovely writing delivered with panache by actors like Anthony Boyle and Dervla Kirwan, this episode is characterized by lovely lighting, too. Director Tom Shankman stages many of his scenes against backdrops of dazzling yet cold gray daylight; it gives everything a bleak morning-after feeling, and it loves the angles of Boyle’s face and curls of his cigarette smoke in particular. In just one episode, House of Guinness has gone from “Well, this should be fun” to “Well, this could be good.” That’s the right direction to be moving in.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.