When Eddie learns that Freddy has betrayed the family, their mother Sabrina begs him not to kill his own brother. Eddie honors his mother’s wishes…but there are some fates worse than death. Back in Season 1, Freddy said that Eddie was the right man to run the family’s drug empire, since he possesses a killer instinct honed in the army that Freddy himself lacks. This guy was simply not cut out to dismember a beloved friend with a chainsaw. You can practically see his mind snap in real time.

It all comes back to Mr. Johnston’s repeated references to the orb and the scepter wielded by kings, representing forgiveness and judgement. Eddie has figured out how to balance the two, at least in the very twisted way that both kings and gangsters wield their power — and the whole point of The Gentlemen is that aristocrats and criminals are one and the same. Long live the king. 

I did a quick little SEO “Ending Explained” piece on The Gentlemen Season 2. I always have fun writing these.

For the second season in a row, The Gentlemen ends on Eddie at his most ruthless and remorseless — a far cry from the man who kept himself up thinking of that poor accountant. Guy Ritchie and Matthew Read’s script, once again ably directed by Eran Creevy, could have concluded the season on any number of notes, from triumph to tragedy; they chose “this guy is a cold-blooded bastard,” and for that they should be commended.

You can extend that commendation up and down the season, a darker, richer, more spectacular outing than the already strong Season 1. It’s still a fun British gangster romp, but it’s got way more in its head than some bloke’s bullets. The Gentlemen was always a good show. Now, it’s A Good Show.

I reviewed the season finale of The Gentlemen for Decider.

This episode of Netflix’s The Gentlemen is wall-to-wall action — a crescendo of dead-of-night tension and suspense that ends in a river of blood. Naturally, I’m going to start by talking about an intimate character moment.

Early on in the episode, before the agents of…whoever engage the mostly civilian members of the Horniman family and household in a deadly game of cat and mouse, Lady Sabrina’s son-in-law Nanny appears to pull rank on Geoffrey in a rather snobbish way. Either not detecting how close Geoff is to the family or not particularly caring, he shoos him out of the house back to his own cottage so that the real family members can relax on their own. It’s an uncharacteristically ugly moment from Nanny, whose primary characteristic besides his impeccable manners is being a big sweetheart.

(Nanny’s race does not appear to be something the show is going to bring up, and that’s probably for the best. The Gentlemen has been so good about its grasp always exceeding its reach, not the other way around.)

But later on, I think we find out the real reason why he gave Geoff the high hat. Left alone with the gamekeeper during the siege — Nanny, an old army buddy of Eddie’s, can more than hold his own in a firefight as it turns out —  Nanny tells Geoff he knows he’s his baby’s real grandfather. His only question is why he never told him, when he kept giving him opportunities to do so. No one ever says as much, but it seems Nanny excluded Geoff because he felt excluded by Geoff.

A deft bit of character work between two supporting players I never expected to have much of a moment together, in the middle of 40 minutes of action. That’s how it’s done.

I reviewed episode 7 of The Gentlemen Season 2 for Decider.

Whoever is responsible, they at least wait until after the wedding to do their killing. The gala itself is beautiful, with everyone dressed to the nines: Benedetta Porcaroli’s sheer party dress literally made my jaw drop, and Joely Richardson, Jasmine Blackborow, and Kaya Scodelario all look sensational as well. (By now you know full well how good Theo James looks all dressed up.) 

I reviewed episode six of The Gentlemen Season 2 for Decider.

Now this is an hour of television that’s successful by any metric. Given the marvelous title “A Suburban A-Road on the Outskirts of Basingstoke” by the location where Lord Edward Horniman finds his salvation — more on that in a moment — this installment of Netflix’s The Gentlemen is the show’s best, I think. 

I reviewed episode 5 of The Gentlemen Season 2 for Decider.

There are two things really worth emphasizing in this episode. The first is how nice it looks. Taking over from creator and co-writer Guy Ritchie, director Eran Creevy displays an eye for striking color and framing. My favorite sequence in the whole episode is just Lord Hawthorne (god rest ye, merry gentleman) in ceremonial red, literally hiding his face in the wardrobe as he calls her with his crisis of conscience, while Eddie and Joe verbally spar in silhouette in a hallway lit in cold blue. Elsewhere, Susie and Bella converse in a crimson-lit multi-mirrored room that wouldn’t look out of place in Suspiria or The Neon Demon.

I reviewed episode 4 of The Gentlemen Season 2 for Decider.

“Once you stop taking responsibility for your own actions, it’s very hard to go back.” Lord Eddie is talking to Susie Glass about his time in the military when he drops this little nugget. She interprets it as a shot at her willingness to follow her daddy Bobby’s orders. I interpret it as an indictment of this charming man, issued by the man himself. He’s decided he has no choice but to do the bad things he does, which means he can choose to do anything he wants.

I reviewed episode three of The Gentlemen season two for Decider.

I’m surprised how much mileage actor Theo James has been able to get out of this core contradiction. He keeps Eddie suspended somewhere in the grey zone between “likeable guy,” “decent person,” and “good character,” which is right where you want the handsome, slightly amoral antihero of your comedic crime drama to live.

I reviewed episode 2 of The Gentlemen Season 2 for Decider.

Genre entertainment of modest ambition that overdelivers on the execution: They don’t make ’em like Netflix’s The Gentlemen anymore. Not often, anyway. Its effervescently violent story of a posh duke turned weed kingpin — it’s Downton Abbey meets Breaking Bad — is played mostly for laughs, but with a welcome hard edge when it needs one. What really distinguishes it is the screwball-level zip of the wittily profane dialogue from creator Guy Ritchie and showrunner Matthew Read, which Ritchie’s surprisingly restrained direction helps its fine cast deliver in style. The thing moves like some earl’s Alfa Romeo.

I’m covering The Gentlemen Season 2 for Decider, starting with my review of the season premiere. Woo!

Much like many (but not all) of its main characters, The Gentlemen is, above all things, clever. For six episodes, it places one proverbial Chekhov’s gun after another on the mantle, to the point where there are more guns than the mantle. Do any of these guns go off in the end, leading to the explosive conflagration we all knew (and admittedly hoped) was coming?

I wrote about the final two episodes of The Gentlemen Season 1 for Vulture. What a pleasure this show turned out to be, no less so for that pleasure being simple.

And just like that, we’re back on track. Not that The Gentlemen took a severe dip in quality in its third and fourth installments, which were good for plenty of fun crime hijinks. It’s just that once you introduce Hitler’s testicle into the equation, things may have gotten a bit too fanciful, even for a show that’s like a Narcos parody set in Downton Abbey.

But with episodes five and six, The Gentlemen comes down to earth, and resumes the breakneck pace of its first two installments. They introduce major new players who look to stay involved for the duration rather than villain-of-the-week types. They feature a startling revelation that completely upends the relationship between Eddie and Susie we’d known. They get surprisingly serious about the human consequences of their telegenic gangsterism. And they remain a ton of fun.

I reviewed the fifth and sixth episodes of The Gentlemen for Vulture.

Under normal circumstances, you wouldn’t watch a pair of episodes in which a woman hacks a man to death with a machete and a machine-gun battle over the future of Hitler’s testicle gets decided with a vintage hand grenade and say the television show in question is taking its foot off the gas a bit. After all, either event would be the most exciting thing that ever happened in, I don’t know, This Is Us. But this is The Gentlemen we’re talking about here, and in its first two episodes, writer-director Guy Ritchie set the mayhem bar pretty high.

But if the show’s third and fourth outings don’t clear that bar, they glide pretty confidently right underneath it. The main issue is simply a structural one. The first two episodes were one long daisy chain of escalating close calls, narrow escapes, and victories snatched from the jaws of defeat (only to be dropped immediately into a new, larger pair of jaws), connected by the Freddy shotgun-murder cliffhanger. These are the kinds of tricks Breaking Bad and even Ozark used to keep things cooking.

By comparison, “Where’s My Weed At?” and “An Unsympathetic Gentlemen” are more episodic in nature. Sure, our heroes’ adventures in both are connected by their deepening, evolving business relationship, as well as by an unknown player using a good old-fashioned honeytrap to get the dirt on their operation. But the two capers are otherwise self-contained, almost villain-of-the-week affairs.

I reviewed episodes three and four of The Gentlemen for Vulture.

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.

I’m covering The Gentlemen for Vulture, where I reviewed episodes one and two.