For almost 30 years, if you needed a director for a gritty-cool British gangster movie, you had Guy Ritchie on speed dial. The Hatfield-born director has helmed some of the classics of the genre, but stuck to feature films (and the occasional music video and TV movie) over the years. With the new series MobLand , starring Tom Hardy , Helen Mirren, Anson Boon, and Pierce Brosnan, Ritchie has leaped to directing TV - for at least two episodes so far. And the folks at Paramount must be pretty chuffed as MobLand has landed the biggest series premiere ever on the platform with 8.8 million views in 7 days, which is a 298% increase in audience volumes compared to its release day figures, according to Deadline.
Ritchie is known for his delightfully churlish characters and fun action beats (Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels) and the coarse yet playful scripts for MobLand are right up his alley. In an interview with Newsweek, Pierce Brosnan talked about Ritchie's style and how the material played to his strengths.
He gave me little things, I mean, the very first day's work, and my entrance as the character when he comes out of his stately home, his mansion. [Ritchie] loves the vulgarity of life and makes it funny, so he had Conrad scratch his nuts. He said, 'Just give them a good old scratch.' And then he did a close-up of it."
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MobLand is the story of two competing London crime families, the Harrigans and the Stevensons. Pierce Brosnan plays Conrad Harrigan, the patriarch at the center of the escalating conflict which threatens to bring down their family's criminal empire. Hardy plays Harry Da Souza, a fixer who must navigate the deadly politics to protect the Harrigans and mitigate a full-scale war between the families.
The series is co-written and created by Ronan Bennett, who also wrote the Michael Mann-directed crime drama Public Enemies in 2009 and has since penned The Day of The Jackal, which has been renewed for a second season. The series is also co-written by Jez Butterworth who wrote Ford v Ferrari and Spectre.
Although the streaming platform could have been called The Taylor Sheridan Playscape, Paramount+ is starting to punch a little harder in the streaming market with new originals that aren't sepia-soaked western soap operas. With MobLand, Ritchie and company have broken the Sheridan stranglehold as the Barbour-coated hit has landed in the same arena as 1923 and Landman as one of the top three launches for Paramount. Despite critics feeling luke-warm on the well-trod plot points in the show, the cast has elevated it as reflected in it's decent Rotten Tomatoes scores.
MobLand was originally a spin-off of the Showtime show Ray Donovan, but was changed to be a stand-alone series and moved from Showtime to Paramount+. It is produced in association with Showtime/MTV Entertainment Studios and 101 Studios.
