Shetland; All the Light We Cannot See; Signora Volpe

“Douglas Henshall’s hugely sympathetic performance was central to Shetland’s appeal. So what a relief that it has successfully managed that tricky switch of lead detectives previously seen in other long-running crime dramas – from Midsomer Murders to Death in Paradise, by way of Unforgotten and Silent Witness. In fact, it feels altogether refreshed, and so far, one of the more enjoyable series yet.”
Gerard Gilbert, The i

“Is Shetland the same without Douglas Henshall and his pink-rimmed blue eyes? No, it isn’t. He provided a moral ballast and touchstone that will be hard to replicate. But Ashley Jensen did a decent job and her curmudgeon character has potential.”
Carol Midgley, The Times

“The relationship between Tosh and Perez was never the most interesting part of the story — he was her boss, occasionally her mentor but not her father figure. More intriguing now, there’s an instant atmosphere of mutual suspicion between Calder and Tosh. Each woman is testing to see who’s really in charge, with a clash of styles: the easy-going, sympathetic Shetland approach and the Met’s tendency to see a door and kick it down.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“The new series still has work to do: despite the two blokes with guns causing bloody chaos, there’s no mystery to unravel yet. But Shetland can maintain its knack of rising above the familiar without its former leading man. It doesn’t need one.”
Jack Seale, The Guardian

“No messing about here, no flashbacks or mysteries, just confident and efficient storytelling.”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph

“It is terrible. The acting is almost uniformly bad. The dialogue gets worse and worse. All nuance is lost, all thought has been excised and it feels both drearily slow and stupidly rushed.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“It’s epic, it’s sweeping, it’s other adjectives that get applied to period productions. It’s also as subtle as a doodlebug. Writer Steven Knight and director Shawn Levy have clumsily scissored the source material to make it less dark and more optimistic. The result is preachy, sanitised and sentimental.”
Michael Hogan, The Telegraph

“This is Netflix at its most awards baiting. Which is why it is symptomatic too of the decline in quality of the service’s output, because All the Light We Cannot See is a dud.”
Nick Hilton, The Independent

“It was a ludicrous plot with a whiff of daytime TV in which, in the space of a few days, Emilia Fox managed to bust open a murderous drug ring, find a floating dead body and save her niece’s life while wearing a Mary Portas wig. Without her, though, it would look like a badly acted advert for the Umbrian tourist board.”
Carol Midgley, The Times

“The series, which first appeared on the Acorn subscription channel last year but is now free to view, is beautifully shot, with lots of soft focus: this is the best-looking crime drama since Endeavour, and far more enjoyable than Emilia’s other show, Silent Witness.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail