Nobody does it like Tom Hardy. I’m not one hundred percent sure what it is, but I’m positive no one else has whatever it is in the palm of their meaty hands the way this exceedingly strange leading man does. Returning for the second of (so far) three greenlit seasons on Paramount+, Hardy gives MobLand a gravel-throated gravitas no other crime show on TV has, because no other crime show on TV has Tom Hardy in it. So put on your best Bane voice and REJOICE! HARRY DA SOUZA HAS RETURNED!

Tom Hardy returns as Harry Da Souza, the perpetually rumpled but frighteningly competent fixer for the Harrigan crime family. Not that there’s much “family” to go around with the Harrigans these days. Conrad (Pierce Brosnan), the wily patriarch, is still nominally in charge after his release from jail at the end of last season. But Kevin (Paddy Considine), Conrad’s legitimate son and theoretical heir to the empire, is making a move for the throne with the help of his politically shrewd wife Bella (Lara Pulver), disgusted with decades of his father’s behavior. 

That behavior includes fathering Eddie (Anson Boon), a callow young hoodlum whose rash actions sparked much of Season 1’s bloodshed, with Bella, and passing the kid off as Kevin’s. Though AWOL from the family, Eddie is firmly in the clutches of Maeve (Helen Mirren), Conrad’s wild and untrustworthy wife. It’s been heavily implied that she abused Eddie as a child, just as Kevin and Bella were abused by prison guards and her own father respectively. Things can get heavy in MobLand.

Meanwhile, Conrad’s “bastard” daughter Seraphina (Mandeep Dhillon) is making a play for the big chair of her own. As we see in this episode, she’s aligning herself with Kat McAllister (Janet McTeer), an American power broker in both the legitimate and criminal worlds. Seraphina has good reason to ally with McAllister, of course: Kat intervened to save her life from a chainsaw-wielding cartel boss as a favor to Harry. When the time came to collect on that favor with a plan to use Harry to take over the Harrigan organization, though, Harry refused, leaving her a threat to all concerned.

And Harry? Well, things could be better. He has at least recovered from getting accidentally stabbed in the chest with a steak knife by Jan (Joanne Froggatt), his increasingly disgruntled and estranged wife. But their daughter Gina (Teddie Allen) is off on her own, helping her awful boyfriend Eddie run a lucrative protection racket with streamers and influencers. Maeve highly disapproves of Gina’s presence in her boy Eddie’s life. Now that Harry’s right-hand woman Zosia (Jasmine Jobson) has tracked both Eddie and Gina down, I can’t imagine Harry will be any happier.

As for him and Jan, he seems to be on his tenth strike, which he blows by walking out of couple’s counseling to take clean up the Harrigans’ latest mess. Jan finally gives up and serves Harry divorce papers, which he greets with the same weary you’ve got to be kidding me, yeah? attitude he brings to every obstacle in his life, from patching up his marriage to silencing pesky eyewitnesses.

He’s got plenty of that sort of work on his plate thanks to Conrad’s latest shenanigans. A meeting at a dog track with Turkish business associates reveals to Conrad that he’s been outfoxed by Kevin. He retaliates by killing every last one of them, with help from both Maeve and his top soldier, Paul (Emmett J. Scanlan). (Paul’s inexperienced nephew Fergus, played by Jack Archer, is deliberately left out of the action.)

All Conrad can sense is betrayal by Kevin, who went over his dad’s head in setting up a meeting with Gakbu (Stewart Scudamore), the Turks’ top man. But Harry sees an invisible hand moving behind the surface. Harry has refused to get involved with his friend Kevin’s power play; he appears to have made an honest assessment of Kevin’s resources, contacts, and chances, and found them wanting. 

If a guy like Gakbu is going into business with an unproven variable like Kevin instead of a known quantity like Conrad, it’s because someone paid him to. That someone, Harry knows, can only be Kat, who’s no doubt salivating as the Harrigans start a war with their allies instead of saving all their ammo for their real enemy.

Harry does his usual thing and follows Conrad’s orders, killing Gakbu and his men even though he thinks this is a mistake. Probably correctly, he believes Conrad and Kevin should patch things up and present a united front against the Yankee threat, Kat. She now has the armor of political legitimacy in the form of the American ambassadorship that her Irish-American political gangster predecessor Joseph Kennedy once enjoyed. She also has a willing agent in Seraphina.

But most importantly, she has the help of the Harrigans’ most dedicated enemy, crooked cop Tattersall (the great Toby Jones). He’s hardly the only dirty badge in play here — Harry’s pet cop Finch (Warren Brown) does most of the mopping up after the dog track massacre, for instance. But even as Harry threatens to kill the bartender who witnessed Conrad’s big shoot-em-up to keep the apparently straight detective Kavanah (Ophelia Lovibond) from coming after the family, Tattersall offers to help Kat find a catspaw through whom she can rule the London underworld. That “paladin,” as Tattersall calls him, comes in the form of Frankie (Johnny Flynn), a family man whose non-threatening nature — he’s grilling wieners, for god’s sake — makes him seem really, really threatening indeed.

Written by Esther Watson and showrunner Jez Butterworth, MobLand’s Season 2 premiere is directed by Guy Ritchie, whose other stylish British gangster thriller, The Gentlemen, just dropped its excellent second season earlier this month. Certain comparisons are therefore unavoidable. MobLand lacks The Gentlemen’s satirical intent, its project of depicting the English aristocracy as gangsterism by another name. It also eschews that show’s emphasis on grand visuals — romantic vistas of the English countryside, screenshot-worthy costuming, gunfights in luscious low light.

Thematically and visually, MobLand is a lower-stakes concern. It’s also less obviously a black comedy, being more of an action thriller drama that’s funny. What it really has going for it is its powerhouse cast, toplined by charisma machines Hardy, Brosnan, and Mirren. You can say whatever you want about Hardy’s mushmouthed machismo, Brosnan’s foul-mouthed Irish gangster caricaturing, and…whatever it is Helen Mirren is doing with that accent. I say to hell with it, and I say the three performances are fun as all get-out. 

Hardy in particular marvelously understates Harry’s menace. He presents abduction, torture, and murder as enormous inconveniences he’s desperate to avoid, rather than grave moral questions he’s fully prepared to answer in the negative. That reaction is both amusing and, when you stop to think about it, terrifying. No wonder this guy’s daughter wished her mom had done a better job stabbing him. 

Now that I think about it, though, I do wonder about the guy. Why does Harry Da Souza prize his loyalty to some idea of the Harrigans above the reality — the backstabbing, the lying, the abuse, the senseless violence he himself helps commit even as he realizes how senseless it is — above his own happiness, and that of the family he supposedly loves more than anything? Why does this man continue serving a system that has done nothing but harm to himself and everyone and everything he cares about?

Huh. Maybe MobLand is asking harder, deeper questions than I thought.

Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.