has reviewed season two of The Gentlemen and landed on a verdict that matches the show’s swagger and mess: irritating, beautifully shot, overlong, extravagantly stupid and fitfully funny. That is the new reality for viewers of the series, which returns with the same hijinks, swearing and men shaking their fists, only now with Theo James’s Eddie Horniman at the centre of the noise.
Eddie is not just any aristocrat. He is the 13th Duke of Halstead, living in a very big house in the country with pectorals the size of Bentleys and plus-fours so voluminous they could accommodate his fleet of gundogs. The search interest around The Gentlemen now is easy to understand: the show has come back, the review is out, and James’s thick-armed enigma wrapped in a yawn is once again being asked to carry a story that keeps getting bigger even as it mocks the idea of seriousness.
The series picks up after Eddie had joined forces with Susie Glass to help head the cannabis operation run by her crime family from a bunker on his estate. Kaya Scodelario’s Susie is still in the frame, as are Bobby, played by Ray Winstone, and Freddy, played by Daniel Ings, with Eddie now trying to shake them off after they left him in a debt-shaped headlock by bailing out Freddy. He also wants to push into an Italian drug deal with Marco Moretti, described as the boss of bosses, while reaching for something even stranger: a hereditary peerage.
That is the part that gives the story its own internal logic. If Eddie becomes a hereditary peer, he can help decide the fate of a bill to decriminalise marijuana, and he can also parade around his grounds in a cape the size of Sussex. In other words, the title is not just vanity. It is leverage, decoration and political muscle folded into one absurd prize. Eddie says the estate once spread out as far as the eye could see four hundred years ago, then adds that it has been diminished year after year and generation after generation. “I want it back, Geoff,” he says. “I want it all back!”
That hunger sits uneasily beside the show’s own treatment of him. Eddie is presented as a muscular duke with the physical authority of a man who could intimidate a room, yet he is also treated as bland, his face apparently never moving. The friction matters because it leaves the drama leaning on style, violence and joke density rather than character depth. Even the new playthings in the plot keep the same tone: a motorcycle chase, a coveted Botticelli, and Hugh Bonneville as Lord Hawthorne, a full-bodied turn from an eminently bribable man who announces, “I am being greased!”
So the answer is not that The Gentlemen has suddenly become refined. It has doubled down. The review leaves season two looking like a louder, longer version of the same crime-comedy machine: handsome to look at, too bloated to be elegant, and still capable of making its excesses land. What remains unresolved is whether Eddie’s push for peerage and power changes anything at all, or whether he stays exactly what the performance suggests — a duke in search of meaning, trapped inside his own inheritance.
