Created by Peaky Blinders showrunner Steven Knight, the new Netflix series House of Guinness will hit the streamer on September 25.. Taking us back to the 1860s, the eight episode series will follow the high-powered and dissolute family behind the stout who are on the cusp of greatness.
“It’s the extraordinary story of a family who happens to be the inheritors of the biggest brewery in the world. They’re young and are given the task of taking on this incredibly successful brand,” Knight told Tudum. “The first priority is: Don’t screw it up. And the second priority is to make Guinness even bigger.”
Surely, House of Guinness is the perfect antidote while we wait for the Peaky Blinders movie The Immortal Man, which still currently doesn’t have a release date. But now we’ve got some first-look images (you can catch up with these below), my biggest fears are confirmed: you just can’t replicate the same gritty Peaky Blinders vibes once you move to Netflix.
Remember how we were all up in arms when Black Mirror made the shift from Channel 4? The show in question takes on an entirely different personality, and that’s just the nature of the beast when it comes to having a global audience on one of the best streaming services in the world. So, if you go into House of Guinness expecting Peaky Blinders (or something like Succession, as early comparisons suggest), I think you’d be a fool… I would bet my life savings on the final product looking much more like a Mike Flanagan knockoff.
Mark my words, House of Guinness will look more like a Mike Flanagan hit than a Steven Knight show
First look at Louis Partridge, Anthony Boyle, Emily Fairn, Danielle Galligan, Fionn O’Shea, and James Norton in ‘HOUSE OF GUINNESS.’The “Succession-esque” series follows the world-famous Guinness family after the death of patriarch Benjamin Guinness. pic.twitter.com/rHOCRLHrc5August 18, 2025
Let me explain. Flanagan has his masterful paws all over content at Netflix, from Midnight Mass and The Haunting of Hill House to the more recent The Haunting of Bly Manor and The Fall of the House of Usher. He’s set to ride off into the sunset with Amazon’s Prime Video to make a Carrie TV show adaptation, and that leaves a tasty Flanagan-shaped hole in Netflix’s annual slate. You might think this is quite a harsh take for both Flanagan and Knight, but I think the proof is already in Netflix’s cookie-cutter pudding.
Every time you’ve watched even just one of the shows I’ve listed above, you’ve likely not seen any visual styling that makes you think ‘this is definitely a Mike Flanagan series’, but does make you think ‘this looks a bit Netflix-y’. If I’m right, then you’ve answered my argument for me. Even though Flanagan has made his Netflix projects his own in other ways, the streamer ultimately makes sure its content looks uniform, regardless of genre. No matter what you watch, if it’s an original, you can bet your bottom dollar that it looks a bit… samey.
Add in the corsets and Victorian vibes of House of Guinness, and you’ve got something that looks like most other Gothic period dramas already on the platform. It’s a quality that’s so difficult to describe that you can’t really verbalise it, or put your finger on what makes Netflix Original concepts so distinct. But if I showed you any of the 11 preview images without telling you where they came from, you’d probably guess correctly without any clues.
All that said, I still think House of Guinness is going to be a huge success for Netflix next month, but we need to view it in its own right. Comparisons to shows that came before are never helpful, because they’re never going to exactly model the ideas that have come before. Quite, right, too. Three cheers for unique bingeable content, people!
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jasmine.valentine@futurenet.com (Jasmine Valentine)
