House of Guinness

True to Knight’s style, it boasts tremendous production values, and is energetic, racy and above all else irresistible.

The series’ cast is across the board excellent. .... Though the back half of the season struggles with some pacing problems and several ill-advised time jumps, House of Guinness is so confident in its own identity that the show mostly makes it work.

The first episode of House Of Guinness shows more than tells, and that’s because of Steven Knight’s expert skills in making his characters vibrant right out of the gate.

The show can border on the cornball; the characters are the sort you might have seen in the sort of dramas popular in 1868. But the actors inhabit their roles with commitment, so that even the bad company is good company. Good craic, as they say over there.

He [Steven Knight] treads the line perfectly between being too serious and a little dour, and being so flippant as to ruin any buy-in the viewers have for the characters and their struggles. It makes the show utterly engrossing and, above all, really good fun.

Comparisons to Peaky Blinders are inevitable, but House of Guinness is a self-contained, captivating drama on its own merit.

House of Guinness is never dull. In fact, as family sagas go, it is, yes, rip-roaring.

There’s something addictive about the intoxicating effect of “House of Guinness,” for all its watered-down corporate intrigue and the sneaking feeling that this ornate costume drama, filled with fire and sex and scheming, is just one big commercial for a beer company that doesn’t need any more help permeating the global booze firmament.

If House of Guinness knows how to grab a viewer’s attention, it’s less concerned with shading in the nuances that might lend the series emotional heft to go with its epic sprawl and electric energy. But when a series is this good at keeping the good times flowing, it’s hard not to get a bit swept up in its veritable rivers of drama.

Although well-acted and engaging, the show fails to pack the same explosive punch as the Cillian Murphy-starrer “Peaky Blinders” or even Knight’s Hulu series, “A Thousand Blows,” which premiered earlier this year. Still, it’s an engrossing enough saga that puts the lore and the myths of one of the Emerald Isle’s most famous dynasties front and center.

For all the heavy subjects that it tackles, Netflix's House of Guinness is a pretty fun romp at the end of the day.

I do hope we get more, because while it may not be wildly original or all that historically accurate, it’s certainly entertaining and a welcome diversion.