Agatha All Along; Celebrity Race Across the World

“Although it remains indubitably [Kathryn] Hahn’s show – you can’t take your eyes off her as she constantly edges up against scenery-chewing without ever going too far – she is surrounded by excellence. The coven and more peripheral characters (many of whom are returning from WandaVision) don’t have a weak link, and the script is burnished to a high shine and slips seamlessly from comedy to tragedy and back again. There is plenty of action, but plenty of depth too. It’s the perfect show for Halloween season, but an absolute treat any time at all.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“While Hahn is reliably entertaining, the show is otherwise a mess; somehow both plodding and incoherent. Nor has it any clear idea of how to portray Agatha – she is selfish and scheming one moment, sincere and big-hearted the next.”
Ed Power, Telegraph

“There was, of course, plenty of trademark jeopardy, in the shape of broken-down coaches, missed connections and fabulously unbothered South American bus ticket sellers to keep the motor ticking over. The four pairs started the last leg within 39 minutes of each other, which though it rendered the race part of the past five weeks somewhat redundant, gave the dash for the finish line some extra heat. I’d pay to be a mosquito on the wall in the edit suite as the show’s directors try to turn celebrities stumbling about getting baffled by oblique direction instructions into something resembling a Tom Cruise action sequence. But we’ve been there, done that with this show. And it’s really not necessary.”
Keith Watson, Telegraph

“Do you ever feel it is fortuitous in the Race Across the World series that the contestants trek thousands of miles independently of each other relying on rail, road, boat and their wits — yet it often seems to be a knife-edge finish? In the previous (non-celebrity) series there were just eight minutes in it after people had schlepped 9,300 miles from Japan to the Indonesian island of Lombok. Extraordinary. In last night’s finale of Celebrity Race Across the World (BBC1), it again looked like a fretfully close finish, where the front two teams were running up a volcano in Chile to reach the lectern at the same time. But it was just clever editing, an illusion to ramp up the tension. In fact two hours and 20 minutes separated the winners and the runners-up. But if you think about it, that is still remarkable given that they’d just hoofed 7,700 miles across South America. If you asked four teams to use public transport from, say, Glasgow to London, they couldn’t even guarantee to get there on the same day.”
Carol Midgley, The Times