MobLand season 2 review: Near-perfect TV entertainment that's never, ever dull

"Chaos reigns" is the slogan being used to promote season two of MobLand, and that’s definitely what happened when it debuted last year. It started life as a relatively sane London gangster saga, with Tom Hardy in the centre as Harry Da Souza, the supremely competent fixer for the Harrigan crime clan.

Pierce Brosnan, Dame Helen Mirren, Paddy Considine, Joanne Froggatt, Toby Jones, Janet McTeer and Lara Pulver were also in it, and it was created by Ronan Bennett of Top Boy fame. It promised prestige and hard grit.

Instead, as MobLand season one went on it became progressively more doolally, its balance persistently skewed by the wholehearted hamming of Brosnan and Mirren as Conrad and Maeve, the married-couple bosses of the Harrigan family, who are both roaring cartoon psychopaths.

Almost every episode saw either Conrad or Maeve recklessly offend or murder someone, leaving Harry to clean it up – nothing made too much sense but, despite having as many plot holes as the Harrigans’ enemies’ torsos had bullet holes, MobLand charged on, culminating in a season finale where a war with a rival drug baron was solved by Harry simply walking into the bloke’s heavily guarded HQ and shooting everyone in the face.

So, the drama returns with an opportunity to reset itself and an enduring problem to solve. Brosnan and Mirren are, along with Hardy, the stars. They are compellingly unpredictable and often very funny: with Brosnan it’s on purpose and with Mirren it’s sometimes due to her attempt at an Irish accent. Either way, they’re box office. But last time, they almost broke the show.

Miraculously, it’s come back with this circle confidently squared. The mindless gangster thrills are still there but with a darker, more sophisticated edge that somehow isn’t compromised by about 25 per cent of the proceedings playing out like a wacky sitcom. The result is something close to perfect TV entertainment: it’s sort of good and sort of stupid, but now there’s more of a sense that it’s nimbly hopping from one to the other at will. It’s never, ever dull.

As a new enemy declares war on the Harrigans, new characters enhance the squad. Ophelia Lovibond is on a slow burn as a police detective who suspects, correctly, that her team contains a Harrigan mole; more quickly crashing the action is Johnny Flynn, an inspired piece of casting as upstart criminal genius Frankie Cooper.

We first meet the perennially tracksuited Frankie in a nail salon, which seems to be where he conducts top-level meetings; later on, he arrives for a tense verbal face-off with the Harrigans by gliding in on an e-scooter, complete with a little white helmet. The battle between the deceptively clownish, energetically disrespectful Frankie and the poised, icy Harry is a major upgrade on last year’s scrap with generic Cockney hardnut Richie Stevenson.

And yet, while that’s rumbling on and while Conrad and Maeve stay outrageous – Harry constantly has to work around Conrad gunning down anyone who irks him, while Maeve’s projects this year include plotting to murder dogs and deepening a relationship with her grandson Eddie (Anson Boon) that can only be described as “queasily flirtatious” – MobLand proves itself capable of serious mobster drama.

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The double-crossing battle of wits between families is far more credible this time around, and it’s capable of classic gangland fare, such as the miniature fable of a Harrigan patsy who serves his purpose, makes a mistake and then resigns himself to an almost poetically pathetic death brought on by his own weakness.

Talking of weak men, Paddy Considine remains an unexploded bomb within the cast as Kevin, the elder Harrigan child whose tragedy is that he isn’t cut out for ruthless criminality, and everyone, including Kevin himself and his increasingly sarcastic wife Bella (Lara Pulver), can see it.

If you scoffed at MobLand season one, you weren’t wrong but you need to run back. It’s properly naughty now.

MobLand season 2 is available to watch on Paramount+ from Friday 18 September. You can sign up to Paramount+ for a seven-day free trial.

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