Handcuffed: Last Pair Standing; DTF St Louis

“After his brilliantly machiavellian performance on The Celebrity Traitors, Jonathan Ross was destined to pop up on our screens again soon. Cue his big post-Traitors gig, hosting Channel 4’s new six-part “social experiment”. It is, explains Ross, a show about whether “a divided Britain [can] settle its differences”, by handcuffing two strangers from different walks of life together for 24 hours a day (including in the shower – ooh-er!) and seeing who can last the longest for a shot at a £100,000 prize. Really, though, it’s a show that manipulates those differences for views – a cheap throwback to Wife Swap at best and The Jeremy Kyle Show at worst.”
Hannah J Davies, The Guardian

“Given the inherent comedy of its premise – the dysfunctional handcuffing conceit has been used in everything from M*A*S*H to The Simpsons toI Love Lucy – it’s criminal just how unamusing this series manages to be. If nothing else, Handcuffed is an instructive look at the fallacies of modern British politics: the sight of a room full of upper-class relics loudly extolling the charisma of Farage ought to rubbish any notion that Reform is a party for working people. But it’s not telling us anything we don’t already know. More often than not, biases are ossified, and the gulfs between people have seldom seemed starker. If Handcuffed is indeed an experiment – and not just a cheap excuse for TV sensationalism – then it is surely a failed one.”
Louis Chilton, Independent

““Let’s get 18 totally different people and handcuff them in pairs for 24 hours a day. The couple who last longest gets £100,000. Then we can pretend it’s making a social point — you know, mending broken Britain. Or something.” Imagine a Channel 4 executive blowing the foam off his oat milk cappuccino and saying these words, and you get some idea of how Handcuffed: Last Pair Standing may have been conceived. It’s a cynical view, sure, but Handcuffed is a cynical programme, which brings together various extreme personality types and — following a Blind Date-style stage reveal hosted by Jonathan Ross —puts them through what most of us would regard as the stuff of nightmares.”
Ben Dowell, The Times

“Viewers too young to remember Wife Swap might like it. I’m sure it will pop up on Gogglebox. For the rest of us, it’s the kind of show you watch for easy entertainment when you’ve been scrolling through the channels and can’t find anything else. Bizarrely, it’s from the same company that gave us The Tony Blair Story. If only they’d merged the two. There are plenty of people out there who’d like to see Blair in handcuffs.”
Anita Singh, Telegraph

“It’s as artificial a format as anyone could devise. Channel 4 does love a bit of voyeurism dressed up as social research, so the players have been selected to ensure maximum contrast and tension.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“The leads all turn in wonderful performances, as do [Richard] Jenkins and Joy Sunday as his special crimes officer partner. Bateman’s ability – first widely on display in Juno – to infuse his everyman persona with carefully calibrated degrees of “creep” has never been more perfectly deployed. But everyone here has an odd, difficult part – especially once the whimsy has worn off – and making them congruent as well as believable individually is an achievement all of its own. You may well find yourself DTFinishing the whole thing in a single watch.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“The tone is low-key and Midwestern. Sex runs through the series, always coming with a hefty dose of awkwardness. The performances are great, but ultimately the whole thing tries too hard to be quirky and offbeat. It’s one of those shows that you are almost conditioned to like, because it’s prestige HBO. But at times it feels ponderously slow and the jokes are never laugh-out-loud. There is one funny scene in episode four but HBO takes this so seriously that it’s slapped on a spoiler warning forbidding me from telling you what it is. I mean, it’s funny, but it’s not that funny.”
Anita Singh, Telegraph