The Gentlemen (2024 Series) Review

Eddie Horniman (Theo James), a British Army captain serving as a United Nations peacekeeper, comes home to find his dying father has left the dukedom to him rather than to his cocaine-addled older brother Freddy (Daniel Ings), and that the estate hides a cannabis farm run for the jailed Bobby Glass (Ray Winstone) by his daughter Susie (Kaya Scodelario). Ritchie, who writes with Matthew Read and directed the opening episodes of both seasons, keeps the world of his 2019 film but none of its characters.

It is his toolkit spread over eight episodes a season: tweed, freeze frames, needle drops, class jokes and violence played for laughs, with capers involving Scouse gangsters, a boxing promoter and Giancarlo Esposito's American billionaire. Badminton House is a splendid backdrop. James is a straight man quietly more dangerous than he looks, and Ings is very funny as the brother who makes everything worse. Lucy Mangan's verdict on the first season, a lot of daft stories crammed together and spattered with blood, is fair.

The second season, released in September 2026, takes the business into Italy, with Sergio Castellitto's crime family and Hugh Bonneville as a crooked peer, and plays darker to slightly warmer reviews. It rarely amounts to more than a good time, and it rarely pretends to.