TV Critics: The Escape Artist; Y Gwyll; Ross Noble: Freewheeling; American Horror Story

“A taut, pacy, chilling – really chilling – thriller not just about what goes on in the courtroom, but about how that affects the lives of people outside. I’m both excited and dreading the rest.”
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian

“What The Escape Artist lacked in original characters, it made up for in scares. Even in this scene-setting episode, there were enough jumpy moments to have you hiding your eyes behind a sofa cushion and nervously counting down the hours till episode two.”
Ellen E Jones, The Independent

“Even I could have come up with a better legal storyline than the first episode of BBC1’s new crime thriller The Escape Artist. It was all very dramatic – and all very daft… Spooks creator David Wolstencroft’s script was filled with clichés and signposts that jostled to fill the entire hour.”
Neil Midgley, The Telegraph

“The sheer quality of acting drew us into a superior legal thriller that got creepier and creepier until it threatened to spill over into gothic melodrama.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“This looks like shaping up to into a cracking legal thriller. Toby Kebbell is spendidly horrid as Liam Foyle, charming in a way that makes you want to go and take a shower, while David Tennant does that hypnotic trick of showing you the range of his emotions with no more than his eyeballs.”
Matt Baylis, Daily Express

“Events progressed with a sense of lamb-to-the-slaughter doom that had you shouting the kind of things that you shout at trashy horror films… Yet none of this mattered too much because it was all executed with chutzpah. Tennant combined dashing and geeky in Doctor Who-ish proportions, while Kebbell exuded weapons-grade creepiness.”
Ed Potton, The Times

“This was streets ahead of The Escape artists in terms of subtlety and sustained moodiness… Richard Harrington made a taciturn hero in the Sarah Lund mould, all hangdog intensity and skinny jeans as he investigated the murder of a spinster who had been shoved off a scenic bridge.”
Ed Potton, The Times

“Not every member of the public ‘gets’ Noble’s particular brand of whimsy and his encounters with these blank-faced Britons were usually awkward, or even sad, as opposed to funny. But though he led us down several dead ends, Noble did eventually turn onto the road marked ‘quality television’.”
Ellen E Jones, The Independent

“If you’re in the right frame of mind American Horror Story gets under your skin like nothing else on television. It’s never dull, far from predictable, and full of fantastic actors who clearly haven’t had this much fun in years.”
Ross Jones, The Telegraph