Paramount+ has a new hit on its hands — a violent, stylish, edge-of-your-seat crime drama from the king of cockney chaos, Guy Ritchie.
According to internal figures from the streamer, MobLand pulled in 2.2 million views for its debut episode on March 30, enough to make it the most-watched premiere in Paramount+ history. The series stars Pierce Brosnan as Conrad Harrigan, a sneering crime boss with a sort-of Irish accent, and Tom Hardy as Conrad’s gruff, hulking fixer Harry Da Souza. And while it doesn’t crackle with the same cheeky spirit of Ritchie’s other recent crime drama, Netflix’s The Gentlemen, MobLand still manages to be a nice break from the Sheridanverse currently dominating Paramount+.
The streamer made the first two MobLand episodes available for the press to screen, and one of the things you notice right away is Hardy’s choice to play Harry with a cool, unruffled professionalism. Harry rarely resorts to overt violence, preferring instead the menacing glare and threat of consequences; in other words, not the sort of thing one is used to seeing in Guy Ritchie stories that are usually populated by wackos, femme fatales, and trigger-happy sociopaths.
“I really wanted to play Harry in a very contained and measured way,” Hardy told me. “To (convey) a sense of professionalism … to talk low and carry a big stick. And not be flashy, which is counter to a lot of gangster [roles], especially in a Guy Ritchie show where it’s quite bombastic and often the characters are very peacockish.”
I asked Hardy what draws him to these kinds of gangster stories and characters. “It’s sort of wish fulfillment and escapism, isn’t it? Watching people doing things that are beyond me doing. And I think there’s something of the comic book within them as well, in many aspects. And, there’s a parody in a lot of it, too — because, in real life, gangsterin’ is pretty horrible and heinous, serious stuff. I think it’s just an escape. And there’s freedom in it as well … like saying, ‘No, I’ll do what I want whenever I want.’ We like to see whether they get away with it.”
Created by Ronan Bennett (who co-wrote last year’s Peacock spy thriller The Day of the Jackal) alongside playwright Jez Butterworth, MobLand is a 10-part saga of power, betrayal, and loyalty, all wrapped in the kind of high-stakes, gun-blazing style you’d expect from Ritchie, who directed the first two episodes.
The story follows the Harrigan family, led by Brosnan’s icy patriarch, which is plotting an expansion into the fentanyl racket. Soon enough, though, pretty much everyone and everything in this series gets overtaken by events when the son of Harrigan’s nemesis Richie Stevenson goes missing — and Harry finds himself trying to keep a tenuous peace between the Harrigans and Stevensons before they suit up for an all-out gang war.
Meanwhile, Conrad’s scheming and manipulative wife Maeve, played by Helen Mirren, pulls strings of her own behind the scenes. Their daughter Seraphina (After Life‘s Mandeep Dhillon) and their son Kevin (Paddy Considine) also bring their own baggage and problems into the mix; Kevin’s son Tommy, for example, is the reason Richie’s boy has gone missing. And then there’s Bella Harrigan, Kevin’s sharp and quietly calculating wife played by Lara Pulver, who gets into trouble of her own.
As if all that wasn’t enough, Harry is married to Jan, played by Downton Abbey‘s Joanne Froggatt, who’s constantly after him about being a better husband and father — never mind that he’s involved in, you know, organized crime.
“These kinds of characters, they’re very charismatic, aren’t they?” Considine told me. “People are just drawn to these heightened characters … Gangsters are enigmatic. People want to sort of hang around with them. It’s stepping into a world that’s not familiar to you. It’s escapism.”
But MobLand also surprises with its emotional core. As Froggatt told me, the show offers more than just sharp suits and gunfights.
“Guy Ritchie’s stamp is definitely on it — there are certain things you’re gonna expect when you tune in to this show,” she said. “So it gives you a lot of that, but so much more. There’s violence, yes. It’s edge-of-your-seat as the show develops — the episodes get more and more electrifying, and the cliffhangers get bigger and bigger. But what feels really original is the heart in it. The themes of family. And also, the women — the women are equal to the men in this show. That feels original and adds a different dynamic.”
At the end of the day, though, MobLand doesn’t really try to break the gangster drama mold. This is a show about bad guys with souls as black as a midnight alley who scheme and kill and flex their power with scene-chewing swagger. Except for Harry, who earns his keep by putting out fires and keeping the Harrigans alive. Brosnan’s Conrad barks out orders like “Put a bullet in his heart” when he’s not pulling the trigger himself, while Harry practically whispers his own violence: “Right now, I’m in first gear … would you like to see me shift to sixth?”
The family trees are a bit complicated to keep straight in the beginning, but at the same time pointing that out just feels like nitpicking. What MobLand is really about is a dysfunctional extended family that happens to be a successful and very powerful crime family. I suspect that peeling back the layers of all these baddies, especially with a cast this strong, is only going to become more of a treat the deeper we get into the season.
