All 5 Guy Ritchie TV Shows, Ranked Worst To Best

Guy Ritchie on television is fascinating because TV forces him to reveal what in his style is actual storytelling muscle and what is just surface sugar. In the movies, he can get away with a blazing opening, a flashy criminal ecosystem, a few glorious weirdos. But television is meaner. Television asks whether the world can keep breathing after the vibes and quirks. Can the gangsters keep thickening into real pressure? Can the side characters become more than delicious interruptions? That is why ranking his shows is actually a great test of what he does best.

And the truth is, when Ritchie works on TV, you can feel two very different instincts fighting inside him. One wants pure velocity: cockney patter, criminal idiocy, aristocratic rot, fast-talking fixers, people underestimating the wrong lunatic at the wrong time. The other wants sprawl: dynasties, inheritance, betrayals, institutions, younger prodigies learning how power really smells once the room gets hot. The best of his shows turn those instincts into fuel. The weaker ones just inherit the costume and the accent and hope that is enough. It is not.

5 'Lock, Stock...' (2000)

Lock, Stock… is my least likeable because it feels like a TV echo of a voice that had not yet figured out how to survive television. You can absolutely feel the appeal. The whole thing is built out of early-Ritchie pleasures: small-time crooks, overconfident mugs, dumb plans mutating into bigger disasters, London criminal life treated like a pinball table where every bad decision slams into five others. If you already love Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, there is some genuine fun in watching that sensibility stretch itself into episodic form. The problem is that stretching is exactly what hurts it. The chaos is there. The density is not.

What is missing is the delicious tightening mechanism his better work has. In great Ritchie, one stray object, one lie, one unpaid debt, one half-smart thug, starts shaking the whole world until the story becomes a gleeful traffic pileup. Here, the characters and capers often feel like they are wearing the style rather than generating it. The plotting has energy, but not enough snap. The side figures arrive with attitude, but not enough pressure. You can see the lineage. You just cannot feel the full pulse yet. It is interesting as a fossil of the brand. It is much less satisfying as a living show.

4 'The Diamond Heist' (2025)

The Diamond Heist lands fourth because it is the odd one out, a true-crime docuseries instead of a scripted underworld opera, and that changes the emotional contract immediately. Still, it makes total sense that Ritchie would be drawn to the Millennium Dome heist story. The setup is pure catnip for him: swaggering criminals, impossible ambition, London criminal theater, and a robbery plan so bold it sounds like fiction even before the cops start circling it. The series is very aware of the fun in that contrast. It enjoys the confidence of the thieves, the shape of the plan, the way one criminal idea can become larger than the men trying to carry it.

But it still feels like Ritchie flavor rather than full Ritchie storytelling. Since it is nonfiction, he does not get to build the kind of layered pressure system he thrives on, where every character has a private angle and every scene secretly changes the power map. Here, the fascination is procedural and historical. That is not a weakness exactly. It just means the show never develops the same emotional intoxication as his better scripted work. You admire the criminal stupidity, the nerve, the planning, the collapse. You do not get fully possessed by the world. It is a sharp little side-trip into Ritchie territory. It is not the deepest expression of what makes him thrilling.

3 'MobLand' (2025–)

MobLand is where the ranking gets serious. MobLand feels like Guy Ritchie aging into heavier furniture. The whole thing has more weight in its bones than the earlier laddish-crime material. The plot follows two crime families. Long history. Old grievances. Modern business power fused to old underworld instinct. And in the middle of it, Harry Da Souza (Tom Hardy), the fixer, the man who has to walk into rooms already burning and somehow leave them with fewer bodies than expected. That is fantastic Ritchie material because fixers are where all his instincts meet: language, threat, class-reading, emotional compartmentalization, violence used like punctuation.

What keeps it at number three is that it feels slightly less like pure Guy Ritchie than like Guy Ritchie entering a larger prestige-crime machine and sharpening parts of it with his fingerprints. The dialogue has bite. The menace can turn funny very fast. The social reading is strong. But it does not have quite the same beautifully overclocked mischief as the top two. It is more granite than fireworks. Tom Hardy gives Harry tremendous tired-force energy, and the older-generation poison around him gives the whole show real thickness. I admire it a lot. I do not love it with that helpless, delighted Ritchie-fan grin the top two give me.

2 'Young Sherlock' (2026–)

Young Sherlock is the ranking that will upset people, and I get it. But as a Ritchie fan, not a “what should be number one on paper” fan, I have to put it here. Young Sherlock is so obviously built around the part of Ritchie’s imagination that loves intelligence as combat. Not just mystery. Combat. The pleasure is not “who did it” in the calm old detective sense. The pleasure is watching Sherlock Holmes (Hero Fiennes Tiffin) realize that the world is already a jungle of hidden motives, coded class behavior, invisible institutional rot, and human vanity, and that the fastest mind in the room can still get crushed if it misreads one crucial signal. That is deeply, deeply Ritchie.

What I really enjoy is how alive the thing feels. The show does not treat young Sherlock Holmes like a museum piece waiting to become proper but like a dangerous unfinished weapon. That gives the whole series velocity. The deductions have movement. The clues have bite. The class world around him feels less like wallpaper and more like a maze built by people who already know how to hide power behind etiquette. There are definitely places where you can feel it leaning on familiar Ritchie-Holmes instincts, the snap, the cheek, the high-speed reconfiguration of character through insight, but honestly, that is part of the pleasure for me. It feels energized. It feels playful. It feels like Ritchie actually wants to be there.

1 'The Gentlemen' (2024–)

The Gentlemen is number one because it is the show where everything Ritchie does well locks in cleanly and stays alive over a full season. The Gentlemen has the best television engine of his career so far. Eddie (Theo James) inherits the family estate and discovers that underneath all the old-money dignity and land-owning prestige there is a gigantic criminal enterprise already humming away. That premise is perfect for him. Aristocracy and criminal logistics. Dry civility and buried menace. Men who think breeding protects them from underworld consequences learning very quickly that drugs, debt, and territorial power do not care about manners. Netflix’s official setup is already terrific, but the show becomes even better once Eddie starts adapting instead of merely reacting.

That adaptation is the key. Theo James plays Eddie so good. Like a man whose real education starts the moment inheritance stops meaning comfort and starts meaning obligation to a hidden empire. Susie (Kaya Scodelario) is essential too, because she is not a side figure or criminal garnish. She is the show’s steel nerve, somebody who already understands the machine Eddie is only beginning to smell. Together they give the series its real pleasure: two intelligent people negotiating whether they are allies, rivals, co-authors of a new order, or all three at once. And the side ecosystem is exactly right, weirdos, killers, wannabes, old money fools, predators dressed as professionals, every room hiding a second transaction. This is the one where Ritchie’s TV work feels complete to me. The criminal world has texture, the plot keeps ricocheting, the characters breathe, and the style is no longer carrying weak material. The material is carrying the style right back.