'MobLand' Is an Experiment in Doing Taylor Sheridan-esque Content Without the Man Himself
Enter the Guy Ritchieverse
Taylor Sheridan does a lot, but he doesn’t actually do it alone. His shows are produced by 101 Studios, an entertainment company that produces a lot of non-Sheridan stuff, too. Sheridan is one-of-a-kind, but if there’s anyone else who understands what other ingredients go into the Sheridan recipe, it’s the people at 101. They’re trying it out with their series MobLand, a crime drama that draws on the Sheridan playbook not with horses and ranches like most Sheridan imitators, but with casting and character dynamics, which is the real secret sauce.
It’s too early for me to say whether it’s successful or not — I’ve only watched the first episode, which is available on Paramount+ — but it is interesting.
MobLand stars Tom Hardy as Harry Da Souza, a fixer for the Harrigans, a London crime family. “Fixer” is a classic Dad Show job. A defining trait of Dad Show protagonists is hypercompetence, and a fixer’s job is to be hypercompetent at solving problems. There’s a purity to a character’s goal in every scene. It’s kind of like a cheat code for character motivation. Jeremy Renner on Sheridan’s Mayor of Kingstown is a fixer. So was Ray Donovan. MobLand actually started out as a Ray Donovan spinoff before it evolved into the non-Donovan show it is now. But it has some Donovan in its DNA.
Hardy’s character’s defining traits are world-weariness and a strained relationship with his family. Hardy himself seems pretty weary here. He doesn’t have the energy to do a weird voice or go over the top. The person going over the top is Pierce Brosnan. Brosnan is Conrad, the head of the Harrigan family, an eccentric old man who is willing to shoot an old friend in the heart at point-blank range and then cry about it. That’s how the episode ends, and it was the first time the episode truly grabbed me. It’s very unusual for this type of character to cry.
Brosnan is being “rinsed” online for his Irish accent, which is very funny, because he is Irish. But it is exaggerated. It’s like how Parker Posey really is from Mississippi but is doing an exaggerated North Carolina accent on The White Lotus (she’s giving a better performance, though). Brosnan is the second former James Bond on a 101 Studios series; his predecessor Timothy Dalton is on 1923.
1923 and MobLand also both have Helen Mirren, who plays similar roles on both shows as the hard-assed matriarch of the family. On 1923, she’s Cara Dutton, the Irish wife of Harrison Ford’s Jacob Dutton. Here, she’s Maeve Harrigan, the Irish wife Pierce Brosnan. Old Bond + Helen Mirren = 101 Studios show. I’m looking forward to Helen Mirren playing hitman Daniel Craig’s mother on Paramount+ in 2028, if TV still exists then.
I think my mind went to “hitman” for that joke because MobLand is created by Ronan Bennett, who also created Eddie Redmayne’s The Day of the Jackal. Da Jackal is more fun than MobLand, which is odd, because the MobLand pilot is directed by Guy Ritchie, whose bread and butter is making fun English crime stories. The madcap style he’s been doing going back to Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels is curiously absent from MobLand, which overall seems like a pretty quiet, talky show. There’s not a lot of music, and there’s not even a lot of background noise in the scenes. Like ambient room tone. It’s literally quiet. It’s also a more quiet story. The thing that really makes the Sheridan shows work is that there’s always something happening. Every scene is high drama.
Aside from the casting, the Sheridinian thing about MobLand is the way it follows different members of the family. The family members all have their disparate storylines, and then come together for big moments. So far, none of the characters on MobLand really pop, but I’ll keep watching. The opening scene, where the Harrigans massacre some intransigent business associates, and the closing scene demonstrated that MobLand has enough ideas that it will be worth checking out for a few more episodes to see where it goes. I’m invested in seeing how the Sheridanesque genre develops.
For TV Guide, I wrote about Amazon’s new horror dramedy The Bondsman in the broader context of half-hour dramas. On paper, half-hour dramas should be the greatest thing in the world, but in practice they haven’t worked. Here’s my theory for why that is:
There are two main reasons why half-hour dramas haven't caught on. One is that viewers don't know how to categorize them. In many viewers' minds, a half hour is for comedy and an hour is for drama, and shows that don't neatly fit this dichotomy throw them off. For evidence of this, see three years of arguments over whether The Bear should compete as a drama or a comedy at the Emmys. This reason is more fixable; if half-hour dramas become more popular, audiences will get used to them, and the problem solves itself. Which brings us to the other, more challenging reason: the perception that half-hour dramas are a lesser art form than hour-long dramas.
I’m waiting for the day when someone cracks it. I will watch that drama so quickly.
I'm with you on half hour dramas. We need more of them!! I finished On Call recently and it's not the best show ever but it's half hour episodes so it was so easy to binge.