Irish critics have voiced their disapproval of Netflix’s new drama House of Guinness due to its “rudimentary understanding of Ireland’s experiences of colonialism”.
The series, written by Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, follows the four children of Sir Benjamin Guinness as they hustle to maintain the success of the family’s iconic brewery after his death.
Although many UK and US reviewers have heaped praise on the series, which is currently the third most watched show on Netflix, Irish writers dubbed the eight-part drama a cliched “shocker”.
“One problem with House of Guinness is the at best rudimentary understanding of Ireland’s experiences of colonialism of Steven Knight, the drama’s creator,” wrote Ed Power in The Irish Times.
Power said the series’s heart-throb character Sean Rafferty, played by English star James Norton, sounded like “a steampunk Mr Tayto” in reference to an Irish crisp mascot, and that the revolutionaries in the show “dress and speak like feral leprechauns”.
Meanwhile, Ann Marie Hourihane wrote in the Irish Independent that the show was an inauthentic “shocker” that offered yet another fictitious version of history.
“The cliches arrive thick and fast. Put it this way: a lot of letters are crumpled up and thrown into a lot of fires,” she said, adding: “The producers do point out that their series is fiction, but then the majority of our popular history is fiction, and quite dangerous fiction at that. We don’t need any more of it.”
The complaints come after Molly Guinness, the great-great-great-granddaughter of Sir Benjamin, complained the show’s characters are “straight from a bingo card of modern chilchés about rich people.”
“The more I watched the more indignant I became,” Molly wrote in The Times, adding it was “unjust” to turn her great-great-grandfather Edward (Louis Partridge) and his brother Arthur (Anthony Boyle) into “fools”.
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But the 38-year-old was most disturbed by the depiction of her ancestor’s charity work, which “is filmed through a lens of shame or self-preservation” rather depicted as sincere philanthropy.
In The Independent’s two-star House of Guinness review, Katie Rosseinsky dubbed the series “a bit exhausting” and “a bit try-hard”. She wrote: “It seems unlikely that viewers will stick around for last orders.”
