Murder in Provence; Killing Eve; Emergency; Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes

“The set-up is lovely, and the locations glorious. I just wish the plots were a little less pedestrian. Someone gets bumped off, a list of suspects is paraded before us, and at the end one of the quite obvious ones is revealed as the killer. The stories aren’t terrible, just standard daytime fare. You’re not here for the plots, though. Treat each episode as a restorative sunshine break.”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph

“The scenes are so bursting with sunshine and colour it’s like a travel show, and I half expected Judith Chalmers or our own Simon Calder to pop up in the local bistro. Instagrammable lunches and fine wines are parked on the whitest of fine linens. Everything is immaculate – puns included – and plays hard into the British notion of idealised Frenchness.”
Sean O’Grady, The Independent

“Now we’re on the fourth and — thank the lord — final series it continues to tread water. With flickers of the old style and panache, yes, but it’s still going nowhere; not so much a cat-and-mouse game between Villanelle and Eve as a moggie chasing its tail in circles.”
Ben Dowell, The Times

“The tone really is all over the place. Is Killing Eve an absurdist dark comedy with an escalating body count? Or a thriller with a few zany laughs squeezed in? With Waller-Bridge writing the zinging dialogue, that confusion was not a problem. Fourth time around, the sense is of having spent too long on a carnival ride.”
Ed Power, the Telegraph

“In terms of format, Emergency was fairly standard and procedural, providing narrative by cutting between the cases at the three hospitals – but it was the breathtaking work and expertise of the NHS staff featured which took the programme far, far out of the ordinary and made this an enormously moving watch.”
Lauren O’Neill, The i

“To learn the outcomes for the people featured in this first episode, we must wait until Thursday night. That lent a ‘cliffhanger’ tone to the end of the episode, whereas I would have preferred the programme to concentrate on fewer cases but share the outcomes with us. It was all a bit frantic, switching from one patient to the next.”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph

“If you watched Sky/HBO’s excellent five-part drama about the disaster (and especially if you are a dog lover), you might have been disinclined to revisit this subject, but you’d have missed something special. Instead of the studied elegance of drama, this was as raw as it gets, a deftly constructed collage of footage freshly gleaned from the Soviet archive by the director James Jones.”
Ben Dowell, The Times