‘House of Guinness’ Episode 3 Recap: Indecent Proposal

Mist on the barren green hills. Wooden crosses jutting up from mass graves. A weather-beaten pesant in a red cloak counsels a sickly-pale young aristocrat in a black one. They speak of starvation and death on an unimaginable scale, a human calamity so profound its scars rise from the very ground itself. 

That’s some good Gothic shit right there!

I do not mean to trivialize the Great Famine, an agricultural catastrophe exacerbated by genocidal British policies that caused the death of a million Irish people, and the flight to America and other safer havens abroad by millions more. Anne Guinness Plunket, the rich young woman in black in the paragraph above, is coming to see the human costs of the famine first-hand, in an impoverished village on her family’s land. Sultan (Hilda Fay), the woman in red, explains to her that she could never leave, like so many others had, because doing so would mean abandoning burial mound where all her children are interred.

Yet despite the disparity in their circumstances, Sultan takes pity on Anne, treating her when she suffers a miscarriage for a pregnancy she wasn’t even aware of. (The father was clearly Rafferty, the family enforcer, not her reverend husband.) She also notes the same symptoms Anne’s been hiding for some time, which would appear to indicate Parkinson’s or a similar disorder. The event convinces the religious Anne that God had a reason to show her that village, and writes her brother Edward with a proposal to devote ten percent of all brewery proceeds to improving the lives of people on their lands, in Dublin, and beyond.

This dovetails nicely with some schemes Edward’s already putting into place. He launches an old-age pension for retiring workers to keep them out of the poor house or the street as old men. (Rafferty, a real piece of work, objects even to this gesture.) The idea is to buoy his brother Arthur’s chances in the next election, now that more working-class people are allowed to vote. 

Of course, Fenians vote too, and do more besides. An unexpected proposal from a bastard cousin in the Brotherhood named Byron Hedges (the great Jack Gleeson, immortal as the all-timer TV villain King Joffrey) opens Edward’s eyes to the role the revolutionaries can play in breaking his black brew into Boston and New York. 

More theatrically, he arranges to have leader Ellen Cochran arrested, freed, then invited for a drink at the posh Imperial Hotel to shock all the high society people. He even invites her and her hotheaded brother to Arthur’s wedding. The idea is that he’s turning over a new leaf for the family, giving everyone a seat at the table…provided they’re willing to wait their turn to eat. Why, he’s even made the harp, a symbol of Celtic, Catholic Ireland, the trademark of the brewery. Ellen’s skeptical, but she downs a pint of Guinness — expertly poured by Arthur — and accepts the wedding invitation at the very least.

Aye, the wedding! No real need for the horrified Aunt Agnes to play matchmaker here: Lady Olivia Charlotte Hedges-White (Daniel Galligan) a beautiful, unbelievably rude asshole of a woman whose aristocratic family is down on its luck, practically proposes to Arthur instead of the other way around. Turns out an arrangement whereby she gets access to the Guinness name and fortune courtesy of an absentee husband who’s perfectly happy to let the both of them screw around, so long as it doesn’t leak, is exactly what she’s looking for. (Arthur doesn’t pull the trigger until he learns that his put-upon butler, Mr. Potter, disapproves. I’m guessing the poor guy’s a secret Fenian.)

Baby brother Benjamin’s being courted by a similarly cash-strapped aristocrat, Lady Christine, but she’s really in love with the guy. That’s the problem. In order to prove himself worthy of her, and to prove his late father wrong to have had no confidence in him, he’s sobered up and enlisted as an officer in Her Majesty’s army. You’ve gotta love someone whose solution to problems is to make them worse.

I can’t say that House of Guinness is firing on all cylinders. Ellen, for example, feels altogether too broad a caricature of a fiery Fenian redhead, down to chugging a pint o’  Guinness with her flaming tresses curling hither thither and yon. I could do with Rafferty getting a little more seasoning than “sexy swaggering tough-guy company man, too; his scene with Ellen suffers as a result of neither quite feeling like people the way Arthur or Anne or even the type-A Edward do.

I think it’s Arthur’s show, frankly. It’s like the man’s callowness — “What the fuck do I care about the people for? I’m a Conservative!” he says at one point, indignant — is in a constant tug of war with actor Anthony Boyle’s soulfulness, with neither side emerging the victor in full. (Also, you see his penis.) That said, Jack Gleeson stole every scene he was in as Joffrey, and he’s already a blast as Byron, so there are other contenders for the crown. Or the harp.

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.