TV critics: Twenty Twelve; Line of Duty; The Newsroom

“It’s the same jokes all over again, and, like the most worn-out Sorkinisms, they become less and less funny with each repetition.”
Tim Walker, The Independent

“I love Twenty Twelve as a portrait of a nation at ease with its unrivalled inability to be any good at anything ever.”
Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian

“Not hilarious, but good for the soul. Like a stone in your running shoe.”
Ben Machell, The Times

“It is, more generally, brilliantly acted, by people who haven’t spent the last 20 years playing other coppers in other BBC dramas. The plot is deliciously confusing, which is not the same thing as being impossible to follow.”
Matt Baylis, The Express

“This is how a newsroom ought to work, not how a newsroom actually works. And, in the long run, the latter might have been more interesting.”
Tim Walker, The Independent

“There’s a lot to enjoy here: sharp dialogue, Daniels bawling at co-workers, the Thing he and Mortimer had that we’ll get the poop on in due course. But at the end of this first episode, with every last hack unbearably self-satisfied at scooping the competition, it was hard not to think: performing smug to uninterested may not be what America needs from its TV news right now.”
Stuart Jefferies, The Guardian

“There was schmaltz and earnestness and optimisim and, on occasion, dazzling bits of smart thinking”
Ben Machell, The Times