Within the first few minutes of The Gentlemen, the show has Guy Ritchie's stylistic touch all over it.
We get the ball rolling with the death of a crackpot aristocrat whose final words are very much not safe for publication, before we segue into a hilariously rewatchable tussle over who will inherit his family estate.
The TV spin-off keeps only one storyline thread from the divisive 2019 movie of the same name: stashing a weed empire in the bowels of Britain's crumbling manor estates. Compared to that original movie, this Netflix show is better in virtually every conceivable way.
The eight-parter is the closest thing we have seen in years to the audacious gangster chic Ritchie made his name off. This is the Snatch Ritchie, the Lock, Stock Ritchie and, to the dyed-in-the-wool fans, the RocknRolla Ritchie.
It's hard not to think of those movies while watching The Gentlemen, in part because there are so many recognisable components here.
There's Vinnie Jones, albeit playing very much against type as a softly spoken groundsman with an affinity for taking in wild creatures. There are colossal debts with special crime syndicate rates of compound interest. There's an artfully hidden weed farm. There's a robust Traveller community.
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But all of this is blissfully shorn of the disconcerting hangovers from a bygone age also present in those outings; like Brad Pitt's deliberately incomprehensible Snatch accent, The Gentlemen's uncomfortable racialisation of the goodies and baddies or the cheeky-chappie male-dominated exclusion of half the population.
It's a revelation after recent attempts to recapture his ritzy brand of thriller – Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre, The Man from UNCLE, even the original Gentlemen movie for many – felt like the efforts of a filmmaker whose best efforts were very much in the rear-view mirror.
Among these doldrums, the praise for his Afghanistan war drama The Covenant could have ushered in a new Ritchie of sensitive, haunting tales away from his native isles.
But perhaps what Ritchie needed was a foray into the longform medium of television to reignite his signature bold, brash, British style. It's woven into the fabric of every scene of the show and even manages to defy the watered-down hallmarks of Netflix.
Glossy flourishes are everywhere. The operatic score is coupled with a liberal use of slow motion, frenetic cross-cutting and whimsical on-screen captions to remind us of various deals and schemes.
Ritchie may have been guilty of deploying his style as a cloak to cover lazy, or even nonsensical, storytelling, but here it is underpinned with enough hijinks, plot points and gore to suck you in.
As with his best ensemble efforts, it's the cast of homegrown talent playing outlandish characters that keep you coming back. The Gentlemen crew master the Ritchie pitter patter, which can be at risk of sounding like it was better when it was on the page.
The first member of the motley cast we meet is the spare heir to the Duke of Halstead title Eddie, played by Theo James. His straight man is slightly upstaged on screen by firstborn and hilarious failson Freddy, played by Daniel Ings.
Freddy is denied the dukedom – which even includes the local village of Heatheringham – but Ings walks away with the show, at least in the first episodes. You do wonder why Ings isn't a bigger name. Perhaps after this he will be. His comic timing and wide-eyed cocaine-fuelled stare are superb.
He's also a fitting barometer for whether you will like this show, since he has no redeeming qualities and turns everything he touches into garbage, but is a lot of fun to watch.
Once the succession has been settled, Eddie goes back and forth on whether to keep the weed farm growing underneath the estate.
Enter the plant's owner: Kaya Scodelario's coolly inscrutable Susie Glass. Scodelario is a revelation. A powerful woman! Up until now we didn't know Ritchie could envisage the fairer sex as anything but mute attendants or clothes horses.
In a menagerie of finely tailored fits, Susie is a gangster in her own right. She goes toe to toe with the criminal underworld, the toffs and even her dad Ray Winstone, whose weed empire she's minding while he's stuck in the cushiest prison you've ever seen.
The moral arbitration on all of this comes, of all places, from a former meth dealer turned arch-businessman, played by Giancarlo Esposito. It's not Gus Fring in a Breaking Bad crossover, but Stanley Johnston – with a 't'.
He's gifted a stark monologue on the aristocracy's land grab, which attempts to ground the show's frivolities in an awareness of the havoc Britain's class system has wrought. The social commentary doesn't really get out the shallow end of the pool, but if you know and like Ritchie, that's probably not what you're here for.
The Gentlemen certainly doesn't reinvent the wheel. It's a prolonged gangster flick drawing on Ritchie's own work as well as a lot of others. The Godfather looms large. Michael Corleone's "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in" is essentially Eddie's entire arc.
What the show does do is showcase Ritchie's savvy filmmaking. The Gentlemen is much like a villain-of-the-week show, but with absurd scenarios.
Even if the style, storylines and characters do amount to silly nonsense, they construct a dazzling web you'll hoover up. When you're done, you'll want another eight in quick succession. Hopefully, this won't be Ritchie's last foray into TV.
The Gentlemen is available to stream on Netflix.
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Previously Deputy TV Editor at Digital Spy and, before that, a TV Reporter at The Mirror, Rebecca can now be found crafting expert analysis of the TV landscape, when she's not talking on the BBC or Times Radio about everything from the latest season of Bridgerton or The White Lotus to whatever chaos is unfolding in the various Love Island villas. When she's not bingeing a boxset, in-the-wild sightings of Rebecca have included stints on the National TV Awards and BAFTAs red carpets, and post-match video explainers of the reality TV we're all watching.
