TV Critics: The Week We Went Wild; The Halcyon; The Undateables; The Great Indoors

“As reality television, it is insanely boring. As a study of everything that is wrong with reality television, you couldn’t ask for more. It was lazy, corrupt, exploitative of damaged, vulnerable people and altogether shameful.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“A mixture of family therapy and survivalism that was bizarre beyond belief. It was patently staged — though how much of that was arranged by the producers, and how much was improvised by this family of drama queens, is impossible to guess.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“The Halcyon seems to have been assembled from the offcuts of other series. And yet there’s something moreish when you unwrap all the recycled packaging. Yes, it has the sheen of eventful soap, but overall it’s much more posh than tosh. Unexpectedly intriguing.”
Jasper Rees, The Telegraph

“Hotels are bustling, frantic places. Wartime is chaotic and unpredictable. So why does The Halcyon seem so rigid? The characters act as though they have been teleported from the 21st century, and are horrified at the cultural attitudes of the Olden Days.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“There’s something cheering about seeing people embarking on the dating game who aren’t yet burdened with abject disillusionment. Well, they restored a bit of hope to this serial Tinderer, at least.”
Hugh Montgomery, The i

“Channel 4 has long since left behind its original brief to cater for minorities, but even if its stories are overtly manipulated, The Undateables is a show with its heart in the right place.”
Jasper Rees, The Telegraph

“Was Stephen Fry really so desperate for work that he had to resort to The Great Indoors? The show is a real stinker, a toothless satire of millennial life, which could only have been written by the kind of long-in-the-tooth bore obsessed with the notion of millennials: take a bow, Mike Gibbons.”
Hugh Montgomery, The i