'The Gentlemen' Season One, Episodes One and Two

The Gentlemen

Refined Aggression / Tackle Tommy Woo Woo

Season 1 Episodes 1 - 2

Editor’s Rating 4 stars ****

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Photo: Christopher Rafael/Netflix

Does crime pay? It does if you watch television in 2024. Before the end of February, the tube served up the end of Fargo season five, the fourth season of its fellow anthology series True Detective, the long-awaited second outing of Tokyo Vice, Sofia Vergara’s dramatic breakout Griselda, and the shockingly good Sexy Beast prequel series. Your mileage and/or preferred body count may vary, but even the worst of these shows (which is True Detective, sorry) has a whole lot to recommend it, and the best (Fargo and Sexy Beast) are among the best of the decade. Surely lightning can’t strike half a dozen times, right? Especially not if entry number six is Guy Ritchie, the quintessential acquired taste, remaking one of his own movies as a TV show for some reason, right? Right?

Wrong! Riffing on a concept — druglords using the vast estates of broke English aristocrats to grow weed — from his 2019 film of the same name, The Gentlemen sees co-writer and director Ritchie more or less remake everything else from the ground up. The result, so far, is a scream.

Theo James stars as Eddie Horniman — and no, the surname hasn’t been joke fodder yet, which I legitimately feel speaks to the show’s restraint. Eddie is, effectively, Prince Harry: His dad (Edward Fox) is a duke, and Eddie is “the spare” to “the heir,” his older brother Freddy (Daniel Ings). He’s even enlisted in the army, working as a U.N. peacekeeper on the Turkey-Syria border. Meanwhile, Freddy, a good old-fashioned Upper-Class Twit of the Year candidate, has amassed a considerable cocaine habit and an even more considerable debt to the proverbial Wrong People.

The first episode, “Refined Aggression,” really kicks off with the dying Duke leaving the whole shebang to Eddie instead of Freddy. This second-son inheritance upends centuries of tradition, as a fuming Freddy sputters and rants: “It goes back to the Bible! Cain and Abel! It’s the will of God!”

Eddie, who wants none of this, nevertheless tries to keep things in order, even when Freddy reveals he’s 8 million pounds in debt to a pair of vicious Liverpudlian gangsters, Tommy and John “The Gospel” Dixon (Peter Serafinowicz and Pearce Quigley). Eddie begins to wonder where all that family money Freddie had pissed away to these people came from, given that his dad’s books reveal basically no income; like many aristocratic families, they’re cash poor.

A striking mystery woman soon solves the mystery for him. Her name is Susie Glass (Kaya Scodelario). She runs the weed empire of her father Bobby (Ray Winstone) during his incarceration, and she had an arrangement with the Duke to run an enormous underground cannabis farm beneath the sprawling family estate, as indeed they do across the country. Since cash-poor aristocrats need to make the money somehow, everyone wins. And by dealing strictly in weed, her family (and the Duke’s) avoid the violence associated with the competition for the harder stuff.

Eddie’s not sure how he feels about all this — partially out of wariness, partially because he suspects there’s more money to be made if he renegotiates the terms — but he recognizes a way out when he sees one. After all, neither he nor Susie want trouble. So while Susie and Tommy hash out a deal to knock out 4 million off the total debt, Eddie scrounges his half by selling his father’s exclusive wine collection to a very rich, very refined fellow named Stanley Johnston (Giancarlo Esposito) — “with a t,’” he’s quick to specify. For unknown but highly suspicious reasons, Johnston is ready to buy the entire family house and estate at double its value.

Freddy, meanwhile, pitches in by repeatedly fucking things up. First, he nearly blows a million pounds on a bogus boxing bet. Susie’s goons retrieve the money, but she makes sure Eddie sees the bloody, groveling mess they made of the guy who stole it. His beating is a message for Eddie as much as anyone else.

It’s when Tommy Dixon comes to collect that things truly go tits up, as they say. Tommy demands an apology from Freddy in the form of him singing an insulting song about himself to the tune of “Old McDonald” while dancing around in a chicken suit. What follows is the crime-thriller equivalent of cringe comedy, like the Alfred Molina scene in Boogie Nights: The challenge for the viewer is to see how much awkwardness around an extremely dangerous individual you can take.

For Freddy, the answer is only so much. During a bathroom break, he gets even higher than he already was (which was pretty fucking high), grabs an antique shotgun, and blows Tommy away. End part one.

Episode two, “Tackle Tommy Woo Woo,” has our gang in cleanup mode. They have to deal with Jethro (Josh Finan), the nice young scouser who comes along with Tommy to count the cash and is now a witness. (Like many people in the Dixon outfit, he was apparently drawn in at first by the Gospel’s preaching; “I didn’t know they were an international crime family with Jesus runnin’ the show,” he says.) The brothers catch him with the help of their knowledgeable groundskeeper, Jeff (Ritchie muse Vinnie Jones), but not before he sends what the characters themselves refer to, with evident annoyance, as “a cryptic text” to the Gospel’s owlish right-hand man, Errol (John McGrellis).

But by the time the Gospel shows up at the estate to investigate, Felix (Dar Salim), Susie’s day-drunk but otherwise reliable equivalent of Mike Ehrmantraut, has helped Eddie dispose of the body and make it look like Jethro killed him and made a run for it with the money. Eddie’s goal is to get the Dixons off the scent of his brother, then get poor Jethro to Australia and spare his life from all concerned.

Are there complications? You bet. Eddie has to kill a Dixon goon and gets shot in the side in turn when he surprises the guy while searching Jethro’s flat for his passport. (Eddie gives himself away by tripping over and disconnecting a wire. Relatable!) Both Eddie and Susie must rebuff the continued advances of Johnston with a t, who, in addition to being the most well-mannered American abroad of all time, is also a billionaire meth kingpin who wants to partner up. (Giancarlo Esposito, a refined and mild-mannered meth kingpin? Well, now I’ve seen everything.)

And as the Gospel points out, the murder weapon is a few hundred years older and a few hundred thousand pounds more expensive than what kids carry in Liverpool. Eddie claims Jethro must have stolen it, which the Gospel buys. He insists, however, on keeping the gun until he can use it on Jethro. There’s a fat chance of that, but not for the reason the do-gooding Eddie thinks: The boat on which Jethro “escaped” on his way to “Australia” is captained by Felix, who disposes of not just bodies but witnesses.

If that sounds like a dense plot, it’s only because I’m fitting ten pounds of TV into a five-pound recap. Stack any two episodes of a crime thriller on top of one another and it’ll sound complicated. But The Gentlemen’s scripts, by Ritchie and Matthew Read, are a breeze. For one thing, the show exists in that early Breaking Bad mode where it’s just a series of escalating catastrophes, and fixing one problem leads directly to the next. I think Breaking Bad proved the watchability of that particular business model.

For another, every scene is redolent with this marvelously dry sense of black humor. No, seriously! Forget what you’ve thought of Guy Ritchie’s crime-caper movies or the ads that show a shotgun-wielding Freddy in his chicken suit. This thing works because of sharp writing, delivered crisply by actors who understand the value of verbal and emotional economy. Theo James is the right man for this job as Eddie, having proved his chops with upper-class comedy in The White Lotus.

Besides, he’s an engaging leading man if you need a handsome guy of his age. In a more just world, his parents would have named him Chris, and he’d be neck and neck with Pine in people’s rankings while holding down a Marvel franchise that, hopefully, his agent had the perspicacity to extract him from at the end of Phase Three.

The other real standout in the early going is Daniel Ings. “Zooted posh nincompoop” is easy to do but not easy to do memorably, and that’s what Ings manages. He’s funny going at top volume as one of the few characters permitted to reach that register, as he does in his rant about being disinherited or during the chicken/murder debacle.

He’s funny being subdued and fidgety and awkward, though, too: When his mum (Joely Richardson) asks why he’s dressed like a chicken, he responds by stammering “Well, quite, yes,” even though it was not a yes-or-no question. When Eddie asks him if he’d ever wondered where their dad was getting the money, his answer is to shrug and suggest “Slavery?”

When the Gospel asks if anyone needs to confess, Freddy (rather shrewdly, I’ll admit) transmutes his obviously nervous affect into a confession about accidentally killing the family cat 25 years earlier, leading to a brief fraternal argument that has nothing whatsoever to do with the more pressing matter at hand. “I thought this was a safe space,” Freddy explains to the Gospel when the gangster tells them to knock it off. “I thought he could handle it; I did.” In short, Ings gives Freddy the air of a man who manages to stumble across every obstacle in his way because none of significance has ever been placed there before. It’s a terrific performance.

There are a lot of quietly hilarious exchanges of misplaced politeness like that. The Gospel deadpanning, “Would it be alright if I dropped by?” in a voice that implies he’s not asking at all. Jethro’s erstwhile captor, Susie’s stoner Chief Product Officer Jimmy (Michael Vu), asks Jethro if he smokes weed while holding him prisoner inside a giant underground weed farm, and Jethro sardonically replies, “Why? Have you got any?” Jimmy also describes how to finger a robin redbreast, for some reason; it involves the phrase “legs spread, wings akimbo” in a chav accent, and I have no idea why it’s in there, and I’m delighted that it is. Even the sight gags (aside from the chicken thing) are largely subdued but no less funny for that — like when the family dog gets its own closeup as the show depicts the grieving faces of the family at the Duke’s funeral, or Jethro theatrically zipping his lip when he turns around to discover his boss dead.

The Gentlemen feels like what it is: a veteran filmmaker putting all his experience and refinement to date onscreen as if he were to the manor born.

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