The Gentlemen

I've watched the second season of The Gentlemen, Guy Ritchie's snarky series about posh criminals, and I kind of lost interest when I realized it was tracking the Godfather saga, with variations on many of Coppola's biggest scenes. (No decapitated horses, but heads definitely roll.)

The series features Eddie, the second son of a British duke, who returns from deployment in the Middle East to discover that his dying father has disinherited his older brother Freddie and given Eddie both the title, the estate, and a lot of debt.

(This, by the way, is impossible. It takes an Act of Parliament to transfer a noble title to someone not first in the succession, and a change in someone's will won't do the job.)

Eddie eventually discovers that his father has a made a deal with a family of drug distributors to grow cannabis on an enormous underground farm on the estate, and entertaining mayhem soon follows as Eddie grows from noble lord to crime lord.

I quite enjoyed the first season, but then I like dark humor and noir, which the series delivered in spades.

The second season opens with Eddie handling a number of problems in an uber-competent fashion, which told me he was pretty well invincible by this point and destined to trample his foes into the dust. He's too perfect. Not that he doesn't have trouble along the way, but even when he's dumped in the woods with two broken legs and a broken arm, he's able to crawl out over two or three days and rescue himself.

It was when Eddie blackmails a politician after drugging him unconscious and dropping him in bed with a corpse, that I began to suspect that other pkotlines from the Godfather were about to play out--- which is a shame, because I was able to predict what was going to happen in the story based on what happened in the films.

I knew what was going to happen to Eddie's wife well in advance of the story. And once I realized that Eddie's brother Freddie was modeled (and named) after Michael Corleone's older brother Fredo, I knew what Freddie's story was going to be. (Though it had a somewhat different ending.) Eddie becoming a cold, calculating moral monster parallels, but doesn't quit equal, Michael Corleone's transformation in the films.

There's even a scene in which Eddie becomes a child's literal godfather, renouncing Satan along the way.

When you're a creative, you should love your models--- why create something if you don't love it?--- but it's possible to love your models too much.