Peaky Blinders with pints is exhausting and far too dark

Kate Rossiensky finds brewing drama 'House of Guinness' sluggish and lacking in subtlety, while for Helen Coffey, 'Wayward' sees Toni Collette at her spine-chilling best

- 

If you didn't already know that Netflix's House of Guinness came from the brain of Steven “Peaky Blinders” Knight, it only takes a few minutes of watching it for the clues to start pouring in. The opening scenes of the new drama, which tells the story of the Anglo-Irish brewing dynasty in the aftermath of the death of Victorian patriarch Sir Benjamin Guinness, are branded with just about every hallmark of Knight's work that you can think of. The words “water”, “malted barley”, “hops” and “yeast” - they’re the four component parts of beer, don’t you know? - shoot onto the screen in huge letters as an anachronistically pounding beat plays in the background.

Then comes more text: “Family. Money. Rebellion. Power.” All very subtle and understated, helpfully spelling out the Big Themes that the series will grapple with, and inverting the usual storytelling maxim of “show, don’t tell”. Before long, there’s an outbreak of very Peaky violence, with henchmen from the Guinness brewery whacking members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood with hammers, as the rebels try to disrupt Sir Benjamin’s funeral procession.

It’s all a bit exhausting, a bit try-hard - and that’s before you’ve started to reckon with the fact that almost every scene seems to luxuriate in dark, sludgy hues that make it impossible to see anything (the perennial scourge of period dramas with pretensions of edginess). And although it’s been billed as “Peaky Blinders meets Succession”, House of Guinness feels more like Peaky Blinders with pints.

The