If you have an appetite for British history, torture and Kit Harington -- in roughly that order -- then "Gunpowder" is the miniseries for you. For viewers, it's a relatively small investment, told in three one-hour installments. For HBO, it's a shrewd and calculated one, picking up a project produced by and starring one of its "Game of Thrones" stalwarts.
Handsomely mounted, "Gunpowder" reaches back to 1605, when England's King James I and his Protestant minions persecuted the country's Catholic subjects, seeking to root them out using the most aggressive of methods.
That prompted an ill-fated rebellion known as the Gunpowder Plot, with Harington as Robert Catesby -- a devout Catholic nobleman who decides to fight back -- and Tom Cullen ("Downton Abbey," as well as the current History show "Knightfall") as Guy Fawkes, the fellow immortalized by, among other things, those way-cool masks from "V For Vendetta."
Catesby, notably, goes against the wishes of his more cautious father (Peter Mullan), and has support from his cousin (Liv Tyler, without much to do except model the period frocks).
The king, meanwhile, is being prodded to act by Robert Cecil (Mark Gatiss), a humpbacked enforcer who is determined to eradicate Catholicism by any means necessary, which includes subjecting practitioners to hideous deaths and creative means of interrogation every time he apprehends one.
