I Hate You; Shantaram; TS Eliot: Into the Waste Land

“‘Weird’ can be very funny, as Toast of London proves repeatedly, but it can also fall flat, as this did more than a few times. Not always, let’s be clear, but more than it should have done from a writer as talented as Robert Popper. Puerile flat-share humour worked with Peep Show because Mark and Jeremy’s characters were so exquisitely drawn. I don’t think these two characters are developed enough yet, but they do have huge potential.”
Carol Midgley, The Times

“Served in double doses, this comedy by Robert Popper — creator of the much-missed Friday Night Dinner — is stuffed with throwaway lines, some brilliant and some wildly off target. The second episode is worth watching just for its gag about Einstein’s famous formula, ‘E equals MC Squared’, and a deft moment with a mug of coffee.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“I kept expecting I Hate You to have a moment of reckoning, a point at which its odd blend of surreal-ish visual gags and toilet humour clicked into place. But, three episodes in, I couldn’t face watching any more to find out. It is like watching two grown women possessed by the spirit of puerile teenage boys.”
Rebecca Nicholson, The Guardian

“Shantaram is a looker, and the thriller it plants at the heart of the action, just before the first episode comes to an end, has moments of intrigue. It knows how to put together a gripping scene and the prison escape is suitably tense. But barely any of the characters feel authentic.”
Rebecca Nicholson, The Guardian

“The show, filmed in India until rising Covid numbers forced the shoot to Thailand, is visually stunning and its portrait of a heady, busy Bombay is the jewel in Shantaram’s crown. But the rest of the series falls flat. Charlie Hunnam is decent as Lin. But his character regularly provides a soppy, overly reflective voiceover, which gives his journey to redemption an incongruous student gap year vibe.”
Emily Baker, The i

“I have never read Shantaram, the best-selling book by Gregory David Roberts. If it’s as bad as the Apple TV+ adaptation, I’ve saved myself many hours of tedium. Roberts’s novel was over 900 pages long, and has been turned into 12 hour-long episodes. But things move sluggishly – after a snappy opening in which Lin escapes from prison – and the action could have been sharpened up considerably by condensing things into fewer instalments.”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph

“I thought Susanna White’s film was terrific, presenting the evidence that vindicated what the Eliot scholar Lyndall Gordon had written decades earlier in Eliot’s Early Years, arguing that his ‘muse’ Emily Hale was central to the poem and indeed was ‘Hyacinth Girl’, a view for which she said she was ‘savaged’ at the time, largely by men. White used footage and expert opinion in just the right amounts, so one didn’t drown out the other and it didn’t lapse too much into pretentiousness, which is always a bonus.”
Carol Midgley, The Times

“It was fascinating stuff, finding the right pitch both for layman readers who have always thought they ought to read the Waste Land but never had, and those after more scholarly insight.”
Claire Allfree, The Telegraph