Running through the plot just now, the whole thing feels rather breezy and entertaining. When your top-billed cast are Tom Hardy, Pierce Brosnan, Helen Mirren, Paddy Considine, and Joanne Froggat, it’s hard not to be entertaining. I’ve seen shows squander strong casts — Zero Day, cough cough — but MobLand is not one of them. I’m not a hundred percent sold on what Mirren’s doing just yet, though she certainly looks incredible doing it, but Brosnan tears into his bombastic crime boss character with grinning ferocity. The moment where he mimics the pigs to whom he fed the gangster who both mentored and molested him is unexpected and delightful. 

Hardy, for his part, fully understands that the innate seriousness projected by his hangdog handsomeness is also innately funny in some way — just as it was when he played Bane, or Venom, or Mad Max. He brings that same blockbuster-role energy to this crime tale, and it matches well with the crisp direction of action veteran Guy Ritchie, who mined much the same vein in his surprisingly strong black crime comedy The Gentlemen on Netflix last year. Both shows even end their premieres with the same inciting incident: somebody shooting someone to death in front of their family in a poshly appointed room in a country house. 

But that comparison doesn’t flatter MobLand. The Gentlemen brought a madcap brio to its story of aristocrats, the original gangsters in most respects, turned actual gangsters, and is maybe the best thing Ritchie ever did. Meanwhile, Paramount+’s fine prequel series to the Jonathan Glazer British gangster classic Sexy Beast, also from last year, had heart-on-sleeve romance and genuine terror that MobLand so far lacks. It’s pretty good, sure, a classic “if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you’ll like” situation. It’s still got time to prove itself to be something more.

I reviewed the series premiere of MobLand for Decider.