The Gentlemen (2024)

The setup

Edward "Eddie" Horniman (Theo James) is the second son of the Duke of Halstead — the spare, not the heir, a former soldier with no interest in the family seat. Then his father dies, and the old man surprises everyone by leaving everything to Eddie instead of his elder brother Freddy, a coke-snorting chaos agent with expensive habits. The inheritance includes the title, the manor, the grounds — and a secret: an enormous cannabis growing operation humming along beneath the estate, run by the organization of imprisoned kingpin Bobby Glass, with Susie Glass (Kaya Scodelario) managing the day-to-day and zero interest in renegotiating the arrangement. Eddie wants out of the arrangement. The arrangement has other ideas. And the only way out, as Susie keeps patiently explaining, is through — deeper in, dirtier hands, sharper suits.

The cast

James plays Eddie with exasperated decency — a man whose entire character is the gap between what he wants to be (an honorable soldier, a dutiful son) and what the job requires (a crime boss with good manners). But the breakout is Scodelario's Susie: razor-sharp, impeccably dressed, utterly ruthless when required and disarmingly funny the rest of the time. She is the rare crime-show second lead who could carry the show on her own, and the series knows it — the Eddie–Susie partnership, equal parts alliance and negotiation, is the engine of every season. Daniel Ings steals scenes as Freddy, the insufferable elder brother whose debts and appetites keep detonating the plot; Joely Richardson brings brittle grandeur to Lady Sabrina, the dowager duchess with her own secrets. Around them: Vinnie Jones as Geoff Seacombe, the taciturn gamekeeper with a past; Harry Goodwins as Jack Glass, Susie's younger brother and the muscle; Giancarlo Esposito, velvet-voiced menace personified, as Uncle Stan, the American billionaire client whose whims move millions; and Ray Winstone as Bobby Glass himself, ruling his empire from a prison cell with the serene confidence of a man who has outsourced everything except power.

Season by season

Season one (March 7, 2024, eight episodes) is Eddie's reluctant descent: £15 million of dirty money to launder before Susie will consider leaving the estate, distribution crises across Europe, a theft on the farm, and a deal with an unlikely ally that pulls the Hornimans deeper into the underworld. The finale finds Bobby ready to retire, offering Eddie and Susie the keys to the kingdom — an offer that is, of course, not really an offer. Season two (2026, eight episodes) picks up a year later: Eddie and Susie are now partners in Bobby's criminal empire overseas, driving expansion — and discovering that Bobby's judgment is deteriorating. The question of whether to move against the man who built the empire gives the season its spine, and the show's answer is pure Ritchie: loyalty is a currency, and everyone is always counting.

Behind the camera

The series was created by Guy Ritchie with Matthew Read, developed from Ritchie's 2019 film of the same name — but this is a spin-off in the true sense, not a remake. New characters, new estate, new power structure; only the grammar is shared. Ritchie directed the first two episodes himself, establishing the visual language: swooping estate establishing shots, dialogue scenes staged like boxing matches, violence that arrives mid-joke. The writing room understood the assignment — the film's motor-mouth patter, transplanted to an eight-hour canvas, gets room to breathe without losing its snap.

Reception

The Gentlemen was one of Netflix's biggest launches of 2024, spending weeks in the platform's global top ten and earning a 7.9 TMDB audience score that has held through the second season. Critics praised the ensemble — Scodelario in particular drew raves — and the culture-clash comedy of the manor house colliding with the grow house. The renewal for season two came fast, and the second season's 2026 arrival was treated as an event by the crime-comedy faithful. The 7.9 is an honest number: this is not a show reinventing the wheel, it is a show polishing the wheel to a mirror shine.

Cultural context

The Gentlemen is the cannabis comedy all grown up. The weed empire as a prestige-TV subject would have been unthinkable twenty years ago; now it is the backdrop for a show about class, legitimacy, and the strange respectability of the modern drug trade. The series sits comfortably in the long tradition of British crime comedy — the sharp suits, the sharper dialogue, the violence that arrives mid-joke — from Lock, Stock to Peaky Blinders' dress sense, and it knows exactly which tradition it is serving. The old-money-versus-new-money engine is older than television itself, and the show runs it at full tilt: the comedy of manners and the comedy of crime turn out to be the same comedy, just wearing different ties.

Verdict: B — The reluctant-drug-lord comedy done right: sharp, funny, and never less than entertaining.