It’s the damnedest thing. I’m sitting here watching the second episode of House of Guinness and thinking “Huh, this seems much stronger to me than the first episode, somehow. Less showy and blunt, more thoughtful, better dialogue, better lighting, an altogether tighter thing.” Great news, right? But then I thought, “Wait, why does this seem familiar?” It’s because the exact same thing happened with writer-creator Steven Knight’s last period piece about 19th-century dirty deeds among people with pretty accents, A Thousand Blows.
Back then, I wrote that “Series premieres, even of very good shows, often suffer from what I call ‘pilot-itis.’ It’s a tendency to go a bit big and braod in hopes of catching and capturing the audience’s attention.” That’s especially true of the House of Guinness debut, which introduced the players and their personalities and motivations with all the subtlety of a kid plopping her favorite action figures down on the floor before playing with them.
It’s the playing that seems to interest Knight more than the setting-up. All of a sudden he’s having Aunt Agnes lament to her headstrong niece, who neither wants to play matchmaker for her brothers nor be married herself, “Oh, Anne, you’re a wave crashing against a rock, made up of gold bands and diamond engagement rings.” You’ve got Arthur, who earlier that day was dumped by his boyfriend Michael (Foundation‘s Cassian Bilton) in a botanical garden, cryptically telling his brother and their body man Rafferty “My peace was shattered today, beside a water lily.”
In the first episode, only Ben the junkie and Rafferty the rake were permitted this kind of lyricism, and coming from them it seemed more like a character defect than anything else. Once everyone gets in on the act, you start achieving some of that Deadwood magic, where characters of low character speak in high poetry.
I reviewed the second episode of House of Guinness for Decider.
Tags: decider, house of guinness, TV, TV reviews