Netflix's crime drama *The Gentlemen* returns for Season 2, with Guy Ritchie continuing to model the show closely on *The Godfather* while notably reworking one of its weaker elements. Eddie Horniman (Theo James), who inherited a dukedom and a cannabis empire in Season 1, completes a Michael Corleone-style transformation from reluctant heir to ruthless crime boss, but the series diverges from Coppola's film by giving its women, particularly Kaya Scodelario's Susie Glass, far more agency than the largely sidelined wives of the Corleone saga.

The article traces close parallels between Eddie and Al Pacino's Michael Corleone: both have military backgrounds that initially distanced them from family crime businesses, both eclipse elder brothers who betray them (Freddy in *The Gentlemen*, Fredo in *The Godfather*), and both lose a bride to an assassination attempt meant for them. In the show, Eddie's fiancée Bella (Benedetta Porcaroli) dies in a plane explosion, echoing Apollonia's car-bomb death in *The Godfather*. The piece argues that by replacing the outsider-wife role with the assertive Susie Glass, and reimagining the equivalent of Kay Adams Corleone, Ritchie corrects what it frames as the film's treatment of its female characters as peripheral.