Drama
House of Guinness
Lawlessness brews in House of Guinness as the children of the late Sir Benjamin Guinness vie for political power and personal pleasure.
One day, you’re working at the hot dog factory, manufacturing processed meats for New Jersey’s consumption.
The next day, automation comes swooping in, and some robot’s knocked you out of a job.
Turns out, it’s not so bad—at least, not for brothers Mark and Hank. The ousting left the two earning universal basic income checks for the foreseeable future—at $3000 a month.
What’s the point in a job if working taxpayers supply your needs? At that pay rate, not working is Mark’s job.
It certainly helps that Mark’s wife, Tammy, supplements their income with her own paycheck from working at the hospital. That money essentially allows Mark to do whatever he wants with his monthly stipends.
Though as viewers will quickly see, most of what he does isn’t the brightest of ideas.
There’s a lot of shows that amount to the kind of thing you turn on to turn off your brain.
It seems the characters in Universal Basic Guys plan to join us in that endeavor.
The show is, largely, a simple sort of humor: The first episode involves a sentient chimp whose biggest desire is to visit the nearby banana-themed amusement park.
And because its humor is simple, Universal Basic Guys often uses problematic content as the basis of jokes and plots. In one episode, a man loses all the skin on his face. Another episode features an embarrassed man hoping to ship back a sex doll when it mistakenly arrives at his doorstep. A third showcases Mark’s desire to catch a giant fish, only to refuse to let go when a whale bites down on his lure (he’s then joined by a Captain Ahab stand-in).
Episodes are often interspersed with sexual innuendo and similar crudities; though nothing is ever shown, verbal references are about as clear as can be. Foul language is in the TV-14 territory (“h—,” “d–n”). And spiritual content pops up, too: Mark befriends the Jersey Devil, a sort of misunderstood demon spawn that a pair of elderly folk hopes to contain using the “dark sacrament.”
None of it ever develops into a plot worthy of a $3000 check.
(Editor’s Note: Plugged In is rarely able to watch every episode of a given series for review. As such, there’s always a chance that you might see a problem that we didn’t. If you notice content that you feel should be included in our review, send us an email at letters@pluggedin.com, or contact us via Facebook or Instagram, and be sure to let us know the episode number, title and season so that we can check it out.)
Worried his wife won’t appreciate the birthday gift he got her, Mark decides to purchase a chimpanzee to win her over—a choice that results in a serious injury.
Someone tells Mark that another man is attempting to sleep with his wife. They warn him that, during a massage, she’ll be thinking of the other man, who Mark calls “Dr. Fifty Shades of Grey’s Anatomy.” We see women in bikinis. We hear some sly references to sex.
Following a facial injury, we’re told that Mark’s temporary replacement lips are made from a pig’s scrotum. Because of how his face looks, a social media site takes down Mark’s selfie, flagging it as an attempt to post a picture of the inside of his rear.
The chimp rips Mark’s skin off his face, exposing the underlying muscle tissue (though this doesn’t seem to faze him, pain-wise). He spends the rest of the episode with a temporary replacement face, made of a grotesque bundle of skin stitched onto his face.
A wolf bites a woman. A tiger rips apart a chicken. We’re told a woman lost her hand to a tiger bite. A snake constricts two men, hoping to kill them. A monkey dies in its sleep.
Someone describes a massage as a “yoga crystal massage.”
A chimp, using an app that allows it to speak, references being injected with the drug MDMA. Men drink beer and liquor.
A voice app says “ducking,” obviously a misspelling of a different word. We also hear a handful of profanities, including “h—,” “d–n” and “crap.” God’s name is used in vain eight times. People describe courage as “having the balls” to do something.
Kennedy Unthank studied journalism at the University of Missouri. He knew he wanted to write for a living when he won a contest for “best fantasy story” while in the 4th grade. What he didn’t know at the time, however, was that he was the only person to submit a story. Regardless, the seed was planted. Kennedy collects and plays board games in his free time, and he loves to talk about biblical apologetics. He’s also an avid cook. He thinks the ending of Lost “wasn’t that bad.”
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