“We need to find a solution,” says a voice offscreen as we focus on a man’s clasped hands. “A way forward.” Within a few minutes’ time, this same man’s same hands will carrying a gun and emptying it into the very people he’s pleading with to find a path to peace. From mediator to executioner in the first scene alone: MobLand is about getting you a man who can do both.
Tom Hardy, as charismatic a screen presence as ever, stars as Harry Da Souza, a top-level underworld lieutenant and fixer. Harry works for the Harrigan crime family, led by its Irish patriarch, Conrad (Pierce Brosnan) and his slightly witchy wife, Maeve (Helen Mirren), serving as both the family’s chief diplomat and its chief enforcer. In that opening scene, when a summit he arranged between two feuding gangs proves fruitless, it’s his job to kill them all as much as it is to have brought them together in the first place. That Conrad essentially lets Harry make the final call himself demonstrates the trust the boss places in him. In fact, I assumed Harry was a Harrigan himself, until I noticed he was calling Brosnan’s character “Conrad” rather than “Dad.”
It’s a blood grandson who gets Conrad and the family into trouble. Eddie (Anson Boon), the flashy offspring of Conrad’s younger son Kevin (Paddy Considine), heads out for a night at a sex club with his pal Tommy Stevenson (Felix Edwards). Since Tommy’s the scion of Richie Stevenson (Geoff Bell), the Cockney nemesis of Conrad and the Harrigans, this friendship is almost a Romeo and Juliet–level transgression.
When a coked-up Eddie stabs some asshole right in the middle of the club, both Eddie and Tommy are forced to flee, while a ludicrously obvious “Firestarter” needledrop blares in the background. The two friends run back into each other down by the river. There, Eddie tosses his knife — and quite possibly Tommy, who hasn’t been seen or heard from since.
Harry is brought in by Kevin to serve as Eddie’s cleaner. He intimidates Eddie into coughing up his clothes and phone and telling him where the incident took place. He muscles the club’s owner into deleting the security footage and divulging the name and location of the victim. He threatens to kill said victim unless he lies to the police and says he can’t identify the man who stabbed him.
Harry does all this using his chief weapon: his sardonic wit. “You can either help me now, or you can carry on doing…whatever it is you’re doing,” he tells Eddie, thoroughly unimpressed with the failson’s tough guy act. “You don’t have to get up on account of me,” he deadpans to a club guard who approaches him threateningly, flashing his piece and adding a polite “Thank you, though.” He specifies to the stabbing victim that if he talks, he’ll later be abducted and tortured by either Harry himself “or one of my associates, depending on my availability.”
None of this comes across as Whedonesque “so that happened” blasé snark, because Hardy very good at making Harry seem so obviously capable of making good on both his implicit and explicit threats that even his sarcasm reads as sincere. There’s a great bit that sums up the self-confidence he emits like radio waves: “Can I take a look at your CCTV from last night, please,” he says to the club owner.
“You’re not a copper,” the guy replies, wise to the act he’s putting on.
“No,” Harry acknowledges easily, before repeating, “Can I take a look at your CCTV from last night, please.” Harry’s a man who doesn’t mind admitting he’s pretending to be a police officer to get his way, then demands to have his way anyway. He’s not a man who bluffs. As he tells his wife Jan (Joanne Froggat) in a completely different context elsewhere in the episode, “If I say I’m gonna do something, yeah? It gets done.”
What he’s not getting done are his husbandly duties. Jan has begun attending therapeutic group sessions by herself, when what she really wants is to do couple’s counseling with Harry, with whom she has a teenage daughter, Gina (Teddie Allen) and with whom she’s also been having some fierce raised-voice arguments lately. She seems sincere in both her desire to mend fences in a meaningful way and her skepticism that Harry will follow through on the idea. However, she also seems pretty obviously interested in Alice (Emily Barber), a woman in her therapy group who’s pretty obviously hot for her in turn.
True to form, Harry gets called away from their conversation by the Harrigans, who by now have learned of Eddie’s connection to Tommy Stevenson and Tommy’s subsequent disappearance, which has his powerful father, Richie, up in arms. After doing his due diligence and extracting a bullshit denial from Eddie, Harry heads in for a sit-down with Richie as a means of avoiding violent conflict. Once again, he’s playing both politician and hitman: Conrad orders him both to try to broker a piece, and to have his people ready to whack Richie if it looks like things are headed south.
Richie takes the meeting because he admires Harry, despite their natural rivalry. The boss assess the fixer as “Loyal. Smart. You might even be wise.” Having your chief antagonist do the Wes Mantooth “I pure, straight hate you…but goddammit do I respect you” routine to your protagonist in the series premiere goes a long way toward establishing your main guy is a mensch. Harry doesn’t return the sentiment (“I always thought you were a bit of a cunt”), but he does wish to avoid bloodshed. He quickly realizes that if Eddie really did have something to do with Tommy’s disappearance, that won’t be possible.
Even so, Conrad calls off the hit on Richie, on his wife Maeve’s advice, which he eagerly seeks before pulling the trigger. “Wrong place, wrong time,” she says, before noting her main objection: She wants them both to be there when Richie Stevenson gets what’s coming to him.
The entire Harrigan family is there when an in-house traitor gets his, at Conrad’s hands. Archie (Alex Jennings) is an old childhood friend turned financial consigliere for Conrad, but Maeve has deduced that he’s secretly working for the Stevensons, who want Harrigan to stay out of the fentanyl trade they control. Since fent is slated to be the funding source for a major expansion of the Harrigans’ enterprises, a no vote from Archie might alter the plans considerably — if Maeve hadn’t sniffed out his perfidy, that is.
So Conrad straight-up shoots him to death in front of everyone gathered for the big family board meeting: Conrad himself, Maeve, Kevin, his older brother Brendan (Daniel Betts), their younger half-sister Seraphina (Mandeep Dhillon), and the family’s glamorous lawyer O’Hara (Lisa Dwan). “The piss has been taken!” he growls before firing, an Ezekiel 25:17 for 2025. Devastated by the act of killing his friend, the tearful man everyone calls “the Governor” snaps at Maeve and slinks off.
Running through the plot just now, the whole thing feels rather breezy and entertaining. When your top-billed cast are Tom Hardy, Pierce Brosnan, Helen Mirren, Paddy Considine, and Joanne Froggat, it’s hard not to be entertaining. I’ve seen shows squander strong casts — Zero Day, cough cough — but MobLand is not one of them. I’m not a hundred percent sold on what Mirren’s doing just yet, though she certainly looks incredible doing it, but Brosnan tears into his bombastic crime boss character with grinning ferocity. The moment where he mimics the pigs to whom he fed the gangster who both mentored and molested him is unexpected and delightful.
Hardy, for his part, fully understands that the innate seriousness projected by his hangdog handsomeness is also innately funny in some way — just as it was when he played Bane, or Venom, or Mad Max. He brings that same blockbuster-role energy to this crime tale, and it matches well with the crisp direction of action veteran Guy Ritchie, who mined much the same vein in his surprisingly strong black crime comedy The Gentlemen on Netflix last year. Both shows even end their premieres with the same inciting incident: somebody shooting someone to death in front of their family in a poshly appointed room in a country house.
But that comparison doesn’t flatter MobLand. The Gentlemen brought a madcap brio to its story of aristocrats, the original gangsters in most respects, turned actual gangsters, and is maybe the best thing Ritchie ever did. Meanwhile, Paramount+’s fine prequel series to the Jonathan Glazer British gangster classic Sexy Beast, also from last year, had heart-on-sleeve romance and genuine terror that MobLand so far lacks. It’s pretty good, sure, a classic “if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you’ll like” situation. It’s still got time to prove itself to be something more.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
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