The Gentlemen Season 2 Review

The Gentlemen was already one of Netflix’s more unusual shows when its first season arrived. It took the slick, criminal world associated with Guy Ritchie and dropped us into the life of Eddie Horniman, a Duke who suddenly discovers that the family estate he has inherited happens to be sitting on top of an enormous cannabis operation. Season 2 takes that foundation and expands almost every part of it.

The world is bigger. The situations are more complicated. The stakes feel considerably higher. And most importantly, the show understands exactly what made its first season so entertaining without simply repeating it. This is a bold continuation that doubles down and delivers.

A world you probably should not be rooting for

One of the smartest things about The Gentlemen is the position it puts the audience in. These are not necessarily people you should be supporting. Eddie has been dragged into a criminal empire filled with dangerous people, questionable decisions and situations that most ordinary people would run away from as quickly as possible. And yet you constantly find yourself hoping everything works out. You want Eddie to make the right deal. You want him to meet the right person. You want his plans to work. When something begins going wrong, you immediately start wondering how he is possibly going to get himself out of it.

That is a difficult balancing act. The series manages to make this incredibly unfamiliar world feel accessible because Eddie himself remains our way into it. He might be surrounded by criminals, wealth, aristocracy and people operating under completely different rules, but the show makes his problems strangely relatable. Not because any of us are secretly running cannabis empires underneath enormous English estates, but because we understand the feeling of watching someone become trapped in a situation that keeps getting more complicated every time they try to fix it.

Season 2 takes that idea much further. Every solution seems capable of creating another problem, and the writers are incredibly good at stacking those problems on top of one another without making the story impossible to follow. That complexity becomes one of the season's greatest strengths.

Theo James completely owns Eddie

Theo James remains the centre of the series, and he is absolutely perfect for this character. What works about his performance is that he never needs to make Eddie particularly loud or theatrical. There is a restraint to him. A look, a pause or a slight change in the way he delivers a line can tell you exactly what Eddie is thinking without the show needing to explain it.

James gives Eddie an almost effortless confidence, but there is always enough uncertainty underneath it to remind you that he is still navigating a world that can turn against him very quickly. That becomes especially important this season because Eddie's circumstances continue becoming more complicated. James somehow makes you believe that Eddie can walk into a room filled with incredibly dangerous people and talk his way through it, while simultaneously making you wonder whether this might finally be the room he cannot talk his way out of.

It is a very persuasive performance. And as the season gets darker, James is given much more room to explore different sides of the character.

Season 2 goes much bigger

If Season 1 was about introducing Eddie to this world, Season 2 feels like the series becoming completely comfortable inside it. Everything has more scale. The criminal world feels larger. The relationships feel more complicated. The consequences of decisions feel more significant. There is a confidence to the storytelling that comes from no longer needing to spend as much time explaining the basic premise. We already understand the estate. We understand the business. We understand the people surrounding Eddie.

Now the writers can start pushing them. And they do. The season keeps finding new ways of putting these characters into situations where there never seems to be a simple answer. That is also why the show remains so captivating despite the length of its episodes. Most episodes run around an hour, sometimes longer, and with eight episodes this is still a substantial amount of television.

That would normally be an issue for me. But the difference here is that the episodes rarely feel empty. There is almost always another complication waiting around the corner, and the cliffhangers are genuinely effective at making you want to immediately continue. If you binge the entire season over a short period, you will definitely feel the runtime. It is a lot of television. But I never felt like the story itself was dragging.

Then the season completely changes gear

Without getting anywhere near spoilers, there is a point roughly three-quarters of the way through the season where the entire atmosphere changes. The best way I can describe it is like a beat switch in a song. You are listening to one track, you understand its rhythm and you think you know where it is heading. Then suddenly everything changes. It is still the same song, but the energy is completely different.

That happens here. The series becomes darker and there is suddenly a genuine sense of dread hanging over everything. It almost feels like the show has been flipped on its head. And because the season has spent so much time getting you comfortable inside this world, that shift works incredibly well. It is one of the biggest reasons I think Season 2 improves on what came before.

The show proves that it can evolve without losing what makes it The Gentlemen.

It looks absolutely stunning

The cinematography deserves far more attention than it will probably get. This is genuinely one of the most visually impressive television shows I have watched recently. The locations across England and Europe look beautiful, and the series takes full advantage of its estates, countryside, architecture and landscapes. There is a richness to the imagery that makes the series feel expensive without constantly trying to remind you that it is expensive.

It just looks good. Really good. And that visual style perfectly complements the strange mixture at the centre of the series. You have aristocracy, old estates and beautifully dressed characters existing right beside organised crime, violence and a massive cannabis operation. That contrast is part of the identity of The Gentlemen, and the cinematography makes those two worlds feel like they naturally belong together. The show also continues using some of the stylised visual explanations introduced in Season 1.

When a character is discussing something that the average viewer might not immediately understand, the series can overlay these sketches and visual elements onto the screen to help explain it. It sounds like a small detail, but it gives the show even more personality.

It knows exactly what it wants to be

The easiest comparison is obviously Guy Ritchie's own work. The series exists in the same world as his 2019 film The Gentlemen, but this is its own story with its own characters. If you like Ritchie's particular combination of British criminality, dark humour, wealthy eccentrics and people attempting to outmanoeuvre one another, the show absolutely understands that appeal. But I would also recommend it to people who enjoy something like Peaky Blinders, or even the polished British sophistication associated with James Bond.

Not because Eddie is a spy. He very much is not. But there is something about watching an incredibly well-dressed man navigate dangerous situations involving powerful people, enormous estates and criminal organisations that scratches a similar itch. And that is part of what makes the series feel so unique within Netflix's current lineup. There really is not much else exactly like it.

The one drawback

If I have one significant criticism, it is simply the commitment required. Eight episodes of around an hour or more adds up quickly. Watching the season across several days can start to feel like a marathon. That is not because the episodes are poorly paced, because I actually think the opposite is true. The writing is strong enough that I continually wanted to know what happened next.

But it is still a long season, and viewers who prefer shorter episodes might feel that. Thankfully, the cliffhangers do a lot of heavy lifting. There were multiple moments where I planned on stopping and then immediately started another episode because I needed to know what happened.

Final verdict

Season 2 of The Gentlemen takes almost everything that worked about its first season and makes it better. It is more ambitious, more complicated, darker and visually stunning. Theo James continues to be fantastic as Eddie, while the writing finds increasingly elaborate ways of forcing its characters into situations where every possible solution seems capable of making things worse. Most importantly, the show knows how to keep you invested in people and situations that you probably should not be rooting for at all.

And by the time the season reaches its final stretch, it proves that it is willing to completely change the atmosphere of the series rather than simply giving audiences more of the same. You absolutely need to watch Season 1 first because Season 2 builds directly from what came before. But if you already loved the first season, this feels like the show fully realising what it can be.

Bigger. Darker. More confident. And somehow even more captivating. The Gentlemen Season 2 gets an 8.5/10.