Tom Hardy’s Controversy-Plagued Mob Show Returns for More Whackings

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Paramount+ In the 18 months since it debuted on Paramount+, MobLand has delivered as much drama off-screen as on, with rumors swirling that Tom Hardy was fired from the series for difficult behavior stemming from anger over his role’s diminished prominence.

His co-star, Helen Mirren, ultimately came to his defense before the studio announced that the Mad Max: Fury Road and Dark Knight Rises star was, in fact, returning for a third season .

Such “creative differences” tumult has cast something of a pall over the show, and it’s true that in its sophomore engagement (streaming Sept.

18), Hardy’s protagonist Harry Da Souza is less the primary center of attention than one piece of its puzzle.

Nonetheless, that shift in direction is slight and does little to derail its ongoing tale of North London’s Harrigan crime family, which remains as clichéd as before—but also cartoonish enough to prove mildly engaging.

It’s a knockoff that’s elevated by its over-the-top melodrama and larger-than-life personalities, the finest of which continues to be Oscar winner Mirren, 81, as a degenerate gangland Lady Macbeth.

Created by Ronan Bennett and overseen by Jez Butterworth, MobLand started off creaky and corny and yet ultimately found its exaggerated groove, energizing rote storylines with flashes of inspiration and characters who felt like deranged variations of archetypes.

In its second go-round, it maintains that balance between the hackneyed and the hyperbolic, beginning with kingpin Conrad Harrigan (Pierce Brosnan) feeling disrespected by a potential drug-trade partner and responding by turning their dog-track meeting into a shooting gallery.

The nominal source of his frustration is his son Kevin (Paddy Considine), who wants to take over the family business and is operating behind his back.

However, as with most of these characters, his real problem is that he’s a madman with severe impulse control issues.

Eventually, MobLand diagnoses Conrad’s rashness as the byproduct of an absurd medical condition, and such silliness is matched by Mirren’s campy tour-de-force as his wife Maeve.

A ruthless schemer who stokes her husband’s murderous instincts at every turn, Maeve is a monster in stylish threads and with an arsenic smile.

Thus, she unsurprisingly takes great delight in her husband’s massacre, even as she covertly conspires to enhance the stature of her vicious grandson Eddie (Anson Boon)—who’s actually her stepson, as he was fathered by Conrad with Kevin’s wife Bella (Lara Pulver), his former mistress.

If that weren’t soapy enough, Maeve also not-so-subtly fancies Eddie, resulting in squirm-inducing incestuous undercurrents that peak during a chat between the two on a waterbed.