Guinness Family Descendant Shares How She Really Feels About New Netflix Drama

A descendant of the real-life family depicted in Netflix’s new period drama House Of Guinness has shared her take on the series – including parts she’s not so impressed by.

Journalist and radio producer Molly Guinness is the great-great-great-granddaughter of Sir Benjamin Guinness, whose death leads to the events portrayed in the hit Netflix series about the family behind the titular stout.

In a piece published in The Times on Friday, Molly admitted that while some parts of the show left her “hooting with laughter”, others made her feel more “indignant”.

In the article, she pointed out that each episode of House Of Guinness begins with a disclaimer insisting that it is fiction, remarking: “It’s art I suppose and I shouldn’t be a bore. Yet the more I watched, the more indignant I became.”

Taking issue with the show for turning her ancestors as “knaves and fools”, claiming many of the characters display countless “modern clichés about rich people”, Molly added that it was “very unfair” Sir Benjamin is depicted as leaving his tenants to “starve to death in the famine” and being a “distant and overbearing father” when in fact, she insists, he was “a loving father and a great philanthropist”.

She also took issue with the family’s charity work being portrayed through a “lens of shame or self-preservation”.

“I confess I did have an episode of righteous fury, but I watched most of it in a vacuum because it was a preview,” she concluded. “The prospect of the laughter of all my brothers and cousins once they get their hands on it is a real joy.”

Read Molly’s full piece in The Times here.

House Of Guinness premiered on Netflix earlier this week to near-unanimous praise, and is currently the number one show on the platform in the UK.

It also boasts an impressive cast that includes Anthony Boyle, Louis Partridge, Emily Fairn, Finn O’Shea and James Norton.