Nothing about being a Guinness is uncomplicated. Ask Ivana Lowell, a scion of the brewing dynasty and a creator of the new Netflix drama “House of Guinness.”
“‘Succession’ with beer and brutality” is how The Times of London neatly summarized the series, which stars James Norton and Louis Partridge. It begins with the death of the brand’s 19th-century proprietor, Sir Benjamin Guinness, at the time the richest man in Ireland, and tracks the fortunes of his four children as they fight for control of an empire built on stout.
Ms. Lowell had the idea for a series over a decade ago while spending the Christmas holidays with her cousin, the Anglo-Irish aesthete Desmond Guinness — son of a baron and the most notorious of the Mitford sisters — at his 12th-century castle in County Kildare.
“I was staying with Desmond and many other Guinnesses at Leixlip,” Ms. Lowell, 59, said by phone from London. “We were halfheartedly watching ‘Downton Abbey,’ and I thought, ‘Oh, our family is so much more interesting and eccentric.’”
Back home in Sag Harbor, New York, Ms. Lowell wrote up a treatment outlining the tale of the beer’s creation by the inventor Arthur Guinness — “He’s the one on the bottle,” she said — and tracing the arc of the family fortunes to Sir Benjamin, by then proprietor of the largest brewery in Europe.
Six years would elapse before Ms. Lowell teamed up with Steven Knight, the creator of “Peaky Blinders,” who fashioned a story that moved “House of Guinness” from development limbo and into production.
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The post A Guinness Heiress Goes to Netflix appeared first on New York Times.
