The Gentlemen Season 1

The Gentlemen takes Guy Ritchie's 2019 crime film to television and does it well. Eddie Horniman (Theo James) inherits his father's dukedom and the Halstead estate, and finds out afterwards that there is a cannabis farm under the grounds, run by Susie Glass (Kaya Scodelario) for her imprisoned father. What follows across eight episodes is a run of situations rather than a story that builds. A debt. A body. A stolen shipment. A rival with better manners than intentions. Each problem arrives, gets handled, and clears the way for the next one.

That sounds like a complaint and mostly it isn't. The show knows exactly what it is. It is a dark comedy with a serious spine, where people die badly and the jokes keep coming, and it never asks you to concentrate very hard. Taken on those terms it is nearly seven good hours. The thing it gets wrong is where it stops. It is a spin-off rather than a sequel, with an entirely new set of characters, so nothing here needs the 2019 film first.

Class and the aristocracy in The Gentlemen

The show is clear about what it thinks of the people in the big house. It keeps coming back to the idea that the aristocracy built its estates by taking from everybody else, and that a duke running a cannabis farm under his lawn is doing what his ancestors did with better paperwork. The criminals here were already in the house, and the joke is that they wear tweed. The series never slows down enough to make the argument properly, but it gives the caper somewhere to stand that an ordinary London gangster story does not have.

Theo James as Eddie Horniman

Eddie is the only functional adult in his family, and the show puts him at the centre of everything. He is a former Army captain who served as a UN peacekeeper, and the series uses that to explain why he is so unbothered by the violence going on around him. With his family he is normal, careful, protective. Outside it he goes considerably further than you expect a man in a waxed jacket to go.

For most of the season things happen to Eddie and he responds. He is putting out fires he inherited, and that is why the show feels episodic even when it isn't. He also gets almost none of the comedy. Everyone around him is funny; he is the fixed point they bounce off, and that is a harder job than it looks. James is good in the part without ever being exciting, and in a show built this tightly around one man, that costs a little.

Kaya Scodelario as Susie Glass

Susie is the best thing in the season. She starts grounded and controlled and disarming, the sort of person who tells you bad news pleasantly. In the middle stretch you see how hard she can grip once she has hold of someone, and how comfortable she is being the most dangerous person in a room without raising her voice. By the end she has softened, or at least stopped hiding.

What makes her unusual is that the genre normally puts a monster at the top of an operation like this. Susie is serious about the work, good at it, and decent to the people inside it. She reads Eddie early, works out that the business needs him, and builds the relationship deliberately. And she withholds feeling rather than lacking it — her brother Jack Glass (Harry Goodwins) is the one place the guard comes down, and Scodelario plays that difference without ever announcing it.

Daniel Ings as Freddy Horniman

Freddy does something, then does something else, then thinks about the first thing. He has no regard for anybody but himself. He is interested in drugs, money and Freddy, and he is the reason the family's immediate crisis starts. When he appears to do something selfless late on, it reads less like a change of heart than another impulse he hasn't examined yet.

He is also where most of the laughs come from, and the show is honest enough to make him repellent as often as he is funny. Getting an audience to enjoy a man this useless without asking them to forgive him is the hardest thing anyone does here, and Ings does it.

Eddie and Susie as partners