Before you press play
Watch if
You want the action, the estate under siege, and a darker, meaner version of the show.
Wait if
What you liked was Eddie and Susie running things together as equals.
Season two takes The Gentlemen out of the English countryside and into Italy, the Peruvian cocaine trade, the House of Lords and a shooting party with a Gulf prince, and it looks like it cost a fortune. The action is better. The violence is nastier. And somewhere in the expansion it loses the thing that made the first season worth watching, which was two people who were very good at their jobs doing them together.
Eddie Horniman (Theo James) is now ambitious rather than reluctant. His plan is to get marijuana decriminalised, invest in the legal trade, and quietly feed illegal product into it. Bobby Glass (Ray Winstone) wants the bill dead to protect what he already has, and Susie Glass (Kaya Scodelario) sides with Eddie against her father. That fight, and what it costs both of them, is the season.
What goes wrong is the distribution of attention. Eddie dominates the season. Susie arrives in bursts.
Kaya Scodelario as Susie Glass
In season one Susie ran things. She was the one people reported to, the one who set the terms, the one who decided what happened next — calm, precise, faintly frightening, and better at the work than anyone around her. She told people bad news pleasantly and you believed she could have them killed on the way home.
She isn't that person here, and the loss isn't in the performance — it's in the position. She turns up, she is impressive for a scene, and then the season goes back to Eddie. It happens often enough that her arrival starts to register as an event rather than a given, and a lead you notice returning is a lead who has been away.
She does have her own track. She builds a cocaine line with an old flame, Joe Green (Tyler Conti), behind her father's back — the first venture in the series that is hers rather than his, and the clearest signal of where the character is going.
The trouble is the shape it keeps taking, and the decriminalisation plan is the clearest case. Turning on her father is the largest decision Susie makes all season, and she does work it through on screen — she pushes back on Eddie, goes through his numbers, says out loud what Bobby will do to them both if it goes wrong. But she is working through somebody else's plan. Eddie reaches it alone and brings it to her finished, and that is the imbalance in their partnership: he sets the direction and she decides whether to follow it.
Theo James as Eddie Horniman
The same problem in the opposite direction. Everyone in this season tells Eddie what he could become. Stanley Johnston (Giancarlo Esposito) does it in a cathedral, over scripture and a sheepskin parchment, at length and more than once.
The season does eventually deliver on it — the back half puts real brutality in Eddie's hands, and the finale is not squeamish about what he is capable of. But by then the speeches have done the work the drama should have done. The season keeps returning to a man being told what he might become, in grander and grander rooms, instead of letting us watch him become it, and eight episodes is a great deal of room to spend on prophecy. The exception, and the best scene he gets, is a confession in Italy where he lists the men he has killed and quotes scripture back at a priest who cannot keep up.
The other flattery is more irritating. He arrives fluent, connected and universally interesting to every aristocrat, gangster and prince in the room. It doesn't feel earned so much as installed.
The romance doesn't help either. Eddie and Bella (Benedetta Porcaroli) are written as a grand love and played as a business arrangement both parties are being polite about. Their scenes have nowhere near the charge of his scenes with Susie, which matters, because the season asks that relationship to carry an enormous amount of weight.
Vinnie Jones and the seventh episode
The best hour of the season, and it isn't close. Halstead loses phone signal, then power, then armed men come through the grounds, and Geoff Seacombe (Vinnie Jones) has to hold the house with a shotgun and a dog. Nanny (Benjamin Clementine) and Charly Horniman (Jasmine Blackborow) are both in the fight and both earn it — Charly reversing over an attacker several times is the most alive anyone in this family has been all year.
It works partly because it is contained — one house, one night, a handful of people and a clear objective — and partly because it hands the lead to somebody else and trusts them with it. Both are things the rest of the season could have used more of.
Where the plotting stops holding up
Two things break the spell. The first is a Botticelli. Eddie and Susie pay £16 million for a painting to appease an Italian crime boss, then carry it out of the auction house with no security worth the name. These are people who run an industrial drug empire underneath the aristocracy.
The second is the mysticism. Bobby settles a sixteen-million-pound question by consulting a spirit in his prison sauna, and Eddie's nerve is restored by a stone he finds in a traffic jam. On its own that is harmless colour. The trouble is that it sits in a show whose whole premise is that these people survive by being cleverer than everyone else, and this season keeps finding reasons for them not to think.
The comedy, and Joely Richardson
The show is darker this year and the jokes have thinned with it, and part of that is structural. Freddy Horniman (Daniel Ings) was the first season's comic engine — the man who would reliably do the stupidest available thing and then be surprised by the consequences — and this season takes him off the board. He spends most of it away from the family, born again and repentant, and comes back as a piece of plot rather than a joke. Whatever that does for the story, it removes the show's most dependable source of laughs.
What's left is odd rather than funny — a long thread about a stolen falcon and its mating habits, which lands about half the time. The reliable exception is Lady Sabrina Horniman (Joely Richardson), who visits Freddy in rehab and spends the entire scene visibly willing him to stay there. She gets a handful of scenes and takes all of them.
Lord Hawthorne (Hugh Bonneville) naming his price for a peerage — cash, plus a night out with Susie's brother — is the other genuinely funny stretch, mostly because everyone treats it as a normal negotiating position.
Is The Gentlemen season 2 worth watching?
Yes, but with your expectations adjusted. The set pieces are better, the cast is deeper and it isn't afraid to be unpleasant. What it gives up is the thing season one was actually about — two people learning to work together — and it separates them, keeps them apart, and brings them back too late for the reunion to land.
Season three is already confirmed. If it puts Eddie at the top and pushes Bobby aside, it will need to give Susie something equally substantial to do, because the show has now spent a full season demonstrating what it looks like when only one of them gets sustained dramatic attention.
Cico and the Botticelli. Cico Maldini (Michele Morrone) talks Eddie Horniman (Theo James) and Susie Glass (Kaya Scodelario) into buying Botticelli's Virgin and Child Enthroned for £16 million to appease Marco Moretti (Sergio Castellitto), then turns out to own it himself and arranges to have it stolen back. Moretti finds out and feeds him to a tiger.
The bill. Eddie and Susie manipulate Lord Hawthorne (Hugh Bonneville) by drugging him and staging Mr Takashi's corpse in his bed so he believes he is a killer. It works until Bobby Glass (Ray Winstone) sends Organ John (Chris Eubank Jr), an enforcer who can kill with one punch, to give him a massage. Hawthorne is found dead, officially a heart attack followed by a fall from a window. The vote collapses.
The grave. Bobby has Eddie beaten and left in a shallow grave with two broken legs and a broken arm. Eddie crawls out and follows a trail of X's to a road — the image the season opened on. He borrows from Stanley Johnston (Giancarlo Esposito) to repay Moretti, with Halstead as security.
Joe Green. Susie's cocaine venture with Joe Green (Tyler Conti) collapses when Vargas's men come for product they had no right to sell. She finds Hector's body at Joe's flat and works out he had been lying since they reconnected. Rather than run with him, she puts him on a plane back to Vargas in Peru and secures her own arrangement instead — a connection that matters later. It is the best thing she does all season, and it only works because the sharpest operator in the show spent months not checking a man she had every reason to check.
Bella. Eddie marries Bella (Benedetta Porcaroli) at Lake Maggiore. Hours later she takes a seaplane to race him to their honeymoon, circles overhead to show off, and the plane explodes in front of him. A murdered spouse as fuel for a revenge spree is the oldest engine in the genre, and the season does nothing new with it.
The wrong suspect. Eddie tortures a captured mercenary until he names Bobby, then hires Moretti to kill him. Susie brings Eddie the piece he is missing — that Bobby bought his debt from Stanley on the morning of the wedding, which makes Bobby the last man who wants him dead — and Stanley confirms it by phone. Eddie reaches the prison in time to help, though Bobby finishes the assassin himself with a shiv.
Who did it. Sabrina Horniman (Joely Richardson) mentions Freddy Horniman (Daniel Ings) called home after a bad dream, which reminds Eddie he told Freddy exactly how Bella would be travelling. Gospel John (Pearce Quigley) reconnected with Freddy in rehab, posed as his spiritual sponsor and fed his resentment about the inheritance until he helped. Gospel John's own account is that they meant to stop the estate passing to Tarquin, and that two members of his community who had lost a child would have raised him. Eddie and Susie reach Gospel John through her Vargas connection.
The ending. Eddie beats Freddy and pulls a gun, then doesn't fire. A van opens to reveal Gospel John bound beside a chainsaw. Eddie makes Freddy do it. Freddy comes out drenched in blood holding the severed head, and Eddie lights a cigar.
Bright Bulbs
- Episode seven is the best hour the show has produced, and Vinnie Jones holding Halstead with a shotgun and a dog earns every minute of it.
- The action across the season is a clear step up, staged with real tension rather than the flippancy the first season used to reach for.
- Joely Richardson gets a handful of scenes as Sabrina Horniman and is funnier in all of them than the rest of the season combined.
- Jack Glass and Susie Glass keep proving how much they will risk for each other, and it pays off every time the show remembers it.
- Eddie Horniman's confession before the wedding is the scene where his corruption finally becomes convincing rather than described.
Dull Bulbs
- The repeated speeches about what Eddie Horniman might become over-explain a transformation that his strongest scenes convey far more effectively.
- The comedy is thinner and stranger this year, and a running joke about falcon breeding is not a fair swap for what's gone.
- Eddie arrives fluent in everything and fascinating to everyone, which reads as the script flattering him rather than a character.
Shattered Bulbs
- Susie Glass is underwritten this season, and the partnership that made season one work is pulled apart and reassembled too late for it to mean anything.
Cast
- Theo James as Eddie Horniman
- Kaya Scodelario as Susie Glass
- Daniel Ings as Freddy Horniman
- Ray Winstone as Bobby Glass
- Giancarlo Esposito as Stanley Johnston
- Vinnie Jones as Geoff Seacombe
- Joely Richardson as Sabrina Horniman
- Hugh Bonneville as Lord Hawthorne
- Sergio Castellitto as Marco Moretti
- Michele Morrone as Cico Maldini
- Benedetta Porcaroli as Bella
- Tyler Conti as Joe Green
- Benjamin Clementine as Nanny
- Maya Jama as Aisha
- Jasmine Blackborow as Charly Horniman
- Harry Goodwins as Jack Glass
- Pearce Quigley as Gospel John
- Chris Eubank Jr as Organ John
- Cosimo Fusco as Carlos Vargas
- Michael Vu as Jimmy Chang
- Ruby Sear as Gabrielle
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- Who Is Eddie Horniman?Who is Eddie Horniman in The Gentlemen? Theo James's duke, from reluctant heir to ruthless crime lord, across both seasons.
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