The first pour looks perfect—sepia light through a tulip glass, a harp logo gleaming like a saint’s halo. That’s the trick of House of Guinness. It goes down smooth, rich in atmosphere and self-importance.
I liked it. It’s beautiful. The costumes have that meticulous dampness only Irish productions can pull off, and the set design practically smells like turf smoke and privilege. But it’s not history. It’s a Guinness commercial with better lighting—and a cast that spends as much time brooding as they do buttoning their waistcoats.
Empire with a Head of Foam
The series rewrites the Guinness dynasty into soulful visionaries, torn between duty to the Crown and love of Ireland. That tension plays great on screen, but the real Guinnesses weren’t conflicted—they were comfortable. They were the Anglo-Irish aristocracy: Protestant, Unionist, and very much part of the system the show pretends they were secretly trying to dismantle.
Arthur Edward Guinness, who the show renders as a reluctant liberal with a discreet fondness for men, was actually hand-picked by Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli to represent Dublin in Parliament. The Queen (Victoria) later made him Lord Ardilaun. Hardly the résumé of a revolutionary.
His relatives, Benjamin and Edward, were no different. They sat in the House of Lords, built model housing for “the respectable poor,” and poured fortunes into charities that promoted good behavior and Protestant virtue. The idea that they were funneling funds to the Fenians—the Irish nationalist rebels who bombed their way through the 1860s—is fantasy. It never happened.
Love Among the Papists
The show takes its liberties elsewhere, too. Edward’s dalliances with a Catholic lover? Pure invention. In nineteenth-century Dublin, interfaith scandal wasn’t romantic—it was social suicide. These were families that drew lines in pews, politics, and marriage. Still, the series indulges in the fantasy: the Protestant heir defiling himself for love and Ireland, the forbidden kisses that double as class warfare.
And then there’s Arthur—moody, magnetic, and endowed like a fertility god. His storyline is all tortured longing and moral ambiguity. He’s gay, but tastefully so. It’s the kind of representation that flatters the present more than it reflects the past.
None of this bothers me. It’s fiction. It’s good television. But when critics start calling it “a vital reexamination of Ireland’s colonial past,” I will have to laugh. It’s not an interrogation; it’s seduction.
Aesthetic of Forgiveness
What the show does brilliantly is mood. Every scene glows with the aesthetic of forgiveness—bronze light, soft rain, confessional tones. The camera moves as if absolving its subjects. The Guinness family becomes a nation’s conscience, their moral haze standing in for Ireland’s.
Every shot hums with repentance, and even the casting joins in. Jack Gleeson—once the world’s favorite boy-king sociopath—returns from self-exile to play Byron Hedges, all tremor and tenderness. It’s almost cosmic penance: Joffrey Baratheon reborn as the conscience of colonial Dublin. You can feel the show straining to forgive not just the Guinnesses, but him, and by extension, itself.
By the time the credits roll, you half believe they brewed freedom right alongside the stout. The real story—that they were empire’s golden children—melts away in the candlelight.
The Aftertaste
If you watch House of Guinness as history, you’ll get indigestion. But as a piece of brand mythmaking, it’s masterful. Guinness has been perfecting this sleight of hand for a century—turning a colonial product into the liquid heart of Irish identity. After independence, the company leaned hard into Gaelic nostalgia: harps, horses, slogans about patience and pride. The show is just the deluxe version, prestige propaganda poured at room temperature.
So enjoy it for what it is. Admire the production design, the accents, and, if you must, Arthur’s impressive anatomy. But don’t confuse it for truth. The Guinnesses didn’t win Ireland its freedom; they just made a fortune while everyone else fought for it.
Still, it’s hard not to raise a glass. The myth is intoxicating, even when you know what’s in it.
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