Guy Ritchie Serves up a Meaty Thriller-Comedy Series on Netflix with ‘The Gentlemen’

 From left, Daniel Ings, Kaya Scodelario and Theo James, cast members in "The Gentlemen," pose together at a photo call for the Netflix film, Wednesday, Feb. 28, 2024, at the Tudum Theatre in Los Angeles. (AP)
From left, Daniel Ings, Kaya Scodelario and Theo James, cast members in "The Gentlemen," pose together at a photo call for the Netflix film, Wednesday, Feb. 28, 2024, at the Tudum Theatre in Los Angeles. (AP)
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Guy Ritchie Serves up a Meaty Thriller-Comedy Series on Netflix with ‘The Gentlemen’

 From left, Daniel Ings, Kaya Scodelario and Theo James, cast members in "The Gentlemen," pose together at a photo call for the Netflix film, Wednesday, Feb. 28, 2024, at the Tudum Theatre in Los Angeles. (AP)
From left, Daniel Ings, Kaya Scodelario and Theo James, cast members in "The Gentlemen," pose together at a photo call for the Netflix film, Wednesday, Feb. 28, 2024, at the Tudum Theatre in Los Angeles. (AP)

When we first meet the hero of Guy Ritchie's new Netflix series, he's not exactly what you'd expect from a Guy Ritchie hero. He's a peacekeeper for the United Nations, under orders to de-escalate tensions. Can that really last, this being a Guy Ritchie series? Doubtful.

“The Gentlemen,” a captivating mix of menacing thriller, satire, soap opera, gangster caper and absurdist humor, will eventually have blood splashing on walls, but it delights in the promise of violence more than the acts themselves.

“Like ‘Jaws,’” says cast member Max Beesley. “You don’t see that shark for an hour and a quarter of the film. But the idea of it is terrifying, you know? And I think that’s quite clever.”

“The Gentlemen,” a sort of British take on “Breaking Bad,” follows an English aristocrat who inherits his family's asset-rich but cash-poor estate and farm only to discover that it also has a massive secret weed farm, run by gangsters. At the same time, he urgently needs to bail his bumbling older brother out of massive debt to even more gangsters.

How the newly titled duke navigates this criminal underworld propels the eight episodes. “Without knowing it, you have stepped into a world that you are not familiar with," he is told. The series begins streaming Thursday.

Theo James stars as the duke, and he says he loved the “idea of a man falling down a rabbit hole and learning to love violence and power and what that means.”

James says, “He thinks he knows power because he’s been in the army and he’s part of the aristocracy, but he realizes power comes in many different forms.”

“The Gentlemen” has Ritchie’s typical examinations of criminality, but it’s less hyperkinetic and frantic than many of his films like “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,” allowing scenes to breathe and characters to deepen. The body count is even lower.

“We’re used to seeing Guy Ritchie in 90 minutes — it’s hard cuts and bombastic, which this is. But we had to make sure that we had characters that felt that they could live through eight episodes and beyond,” says James.

The series has been spun off from the writer-director's 2019 film of the same name and features con jobs, a man dancing in a chicken suit, the always-welcome presence of Vinnie Jones, manic murder chases, gagged hostages, a Lamborghini heist, some beheadings and a soundtrack of choirs chanting religious text.

“We’ve just been given a much bigger canvas,” says Beesley. “The strokes are as thick, the paint is as thick. It’s just a multi-multifaceted bit of drama that incorporates everything that I think audiences like — drama, comedy, action. It’s all in there.”

In Ritchie’s world, the low-class gangsters who wear tracksuits are the same as the snooty upper classes who wear $50,000 three-piece suits — both groups cultured enough to appreciate the design of a classic Mercedes and a properly decanted 2002 Romanée-Conti.

“He’s making the point that the British landed gentry aristocracy really are the original gangsters of the British class society,” says Daniel Ings, who plays the duke's older brother. “There’s kind of like a need to fight for survival in both of those worlds.”

The series also stars Joely Richardson, Giancarlo Esposito, Shane Walker and Kaya Scodelario, who plays Susie, a very cool but very non-nonsense underworld captain, who says things like: “Once you start the killing, you have to finish the killing.”

“It was one of the rare times where I instantly knew I wanted to play this character with every fiber of my being. I kind of loved her immediately and wanted to get under her skin. I just knew that I could bring something to her and that she would be exciting,” Scodelario says.

“Especially in this world — this Guy Ritchie universe where a lot of times the focus has been on these male characters — I thought would be really fun and interesting to introduce Susie, who can kind of go toe to toe with all of them.”

The series — written by Ritchie and Matthew Read and with the first two episodes directed by Ritchie — enjoys refinement with aggression, which is the title of the pilot episode and could be Ritchie’s calling card here. There is also his characteristic quirky sense of humor.

“Finding that line between the ridiculous and the benign — finding hilarity, but not too hard on the silliness so the stakes are not lost, but then finding drama but not too dramatic so it becomes melodramatic in any way — weaving that line was always a very specific and quite complex thing to do,” says James.

The cast hopes the series can find a worldwide audience despite being rooted in the grand estates of England. It is, after all, about more than just a duke bluffing his way through the world of criminals.

“The heart of it for me is that it’s a family drama,” says Scodelario. “It’s all these different families realizing that they all need each other to coexist, and they want to protect their family above everything else. And I think that’s just a really interesting narrative.”



‘The Osbournes’ Changed Ozzy’s Image from Grisly to Cuddly, and Changed Reality TV 

Metal-rock star Ozzy Osbourne holds a replica of his new star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame as he poses with his family during a ceremony on April 12, 2002, in Los Angeles. Pictured with Osbourne, from left, are Aimee, Sharon, Kelly, Jack and Louis. (AP Photo/Nick Ut, File)
Metal-rock star Ozzy Osbourne holds a replica of his new star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame as he poses with his family during a ceremony on April 12, 2002, in Los Angeles. Pictured with Osbourne, from left, are Aimee, Sharon, Kelly, Jack and Louis. (AP Photo/Nick Ut, File)
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‘The Osbournes’ Changed Ozzy’s Image from Grisly to Cuddly, and Changed Reality TV 

Metal-rock star Ozzy Osbourne holds a replica of his new star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame as he poses with his family during a ceremony on April 12, 2002, in Los Angeles. Pictured with Osbourne, from left, are Aimee, Sharon, Kelly, Jack and Louis. (AP Photo/Nick Ut, File)
Metal-rock star Ozzy Osbourne holds a replica of his new star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame as he poses with his family during a ceremony on April 12, 2002, in Los Angeles. Pictured with Osbourne, from left, are Aimee, Sharon, Kelly, Jack and Louis. (AP Photo/Nick Ut, File)

There was Ozzy before "The Osbournes" and Ozzy after "The Osbournes."

For much of his life, the Black Sabbath founder and legendary heavy metal frontman who died at 76 on Tuesday was known to much of the public as a dark purveyor of deeds.

Wild stories followed him. Clergy condemned him. Parents sued him.

But with the debut of his family reality show on MTV, the world learned what those who'd been paying closer attention already knew: Ozzy Osbourne was soft and fuzzy under the darkness.

During its relatively short run from 2002 to 2005, "The Osbournes" became a runaway hit and made stars of his wife Sharon and kids Jack and Kelly. But more than that, it made a star of the domesticated version of Ozzy Osbourne, and in the process changed reality TV.

In 2025, when virtually every variety of celebrity has had a reality show, it's hard to see what a novelty the series was. MTV sold it as television's first "reality sitcom."

"Just the idea of the Black Sabbath founder, who will forever be known for biting the head off a bat during a 1982 concert, as a family man seems strange," Associated Press Media Writer David Bauder wrote on the eve of "The Osbournes" premiere. But on the show, Osbourne was "sweetly funny — and under everything a lot like the put-upon dads you’ve been seeing in television sitcoms for generations."

Danny Deraney, a publicist who worked with Osbourne and was a lifelong fan, said of the show, "You saw some guy who was curious. You saw some guy who was being funny. You just saw pretty much the real thing."

"He’s not the guy that everyone associates with the ‘Prince of Darkness’ and all this craziness," Deraney said. "And people loved him. He became so affable to so many people because of that show. As metal fans, we knew it. We knew that’s who he was. But now everyone knew."

Reality shows at the time, especially the popular competition shows like "Survivor," thrived on heightened circumstances. For "The Osbournes," no stakes were too low.

They sat on the couch. They ate dinner. The now-sober Ozzy sipped Diet Cokes, and urged his kids not to indulge in alcohol or drugs when they went out. He struggled to find the History Channel on his satellite TV. They feuded with the neighbors because, of all things, their loud music was driving the Osbournes crazy.

"You were seeing this really fascinating, appealing, bizarre tension between the public persona of a celebrity and their mundane experiences at home," said Kathryn VanArendonk, a critic for Vulture and New York Magazine.

The sitcom tone was apparent from its first moments.

"You turn on this show and you get this like little jazzy cover theme song of the song ‘Crazy Train,’ and there’s all these bright colors and fancy editing, and we just got to see this like totally 180-degree different side of Ozzy which was just surprising and incredible to watch," said Nick Caruso, staff editor at TVLine.

Like family sitcoms, the affection its leads clearly had for each other was essential to its appeal.

"For some reason, we kind of just fell in love with them the same way that we grew to love Ozzy and Sharon as like a marital unit," Caruso said.

What was maybe strangest about the show was how not-strange it felt. The two Ozzies seemed seamless rather than contradictory.

"You’re realizing that these things are personas and that all personas are these like elaborate complex mosaics of like who a person is," VanArendonk said.

"The Osbournes" had both an immediate and a long-term affect on the genre.

Both Caruso and VanArendonk said shows like "Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica," which followed then-pop stars Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey after they married, was clearly a descendant.

And countless other shows felt its influence, from "The Kardashians" to "The Baldwins" — the recently debuted reality series on Alec Baldwin, his wife Hilaria and their seven kids.

"'The Baldwins’ as a reality show is explicitly modeled on ‘The Osbournes,’ VanArendonk said. "It’s like you have these famous people and now you get to see what their home lives are like, what they are like as parents, what they’re eating, what they are taking on with them on vacation, who their pets are, and they are these sort of cuddly, warm, eccentric figures."