Not Welcome: The Battle to Stop the Boats; Love Story; How To Get To Heaven From Belfast

“Are the three people featured a representative sample? Besides anger about asylum seekers receiving accommodation and living expenses, British people’s main opposition to the arrival of undocumented migrants is the fear of violent crime. Yet here we have a woman, an 18-year-old man who talks sweetly about his parents back home, and a transgender man whose excellent English suggests a middle-class background and whom we last saw working happily in a pet shop. The stories are made palatable for a Channel 4 audience but don’t address root concerns. All three are granted asylum. The producers should go back and film them in five or 10 years’ time to learn how their lives in Britain turn out. The same goes for Chloe, because once the threat of the asylum hotel has disappeared and the politicians have moved on, will anyone care to address the crime and deprivation she described?”
Anita Singh, Telegraph

“You want some unashamedly romantic, star-crossed love? An impossibly glamorous couple falling out and making up? Consider yourself in luck. In the 1990s John F Kennedy Jr and Carolyn Bessette were a sensation and in Love Story: John F Kennedy Jr and Carolyn Bessette (Disney+), the latest anthology series from Ryan Murphy’s factory of guilty pleasures, they are portrayed with all the vivid gloss of The Crown. In fact it shows how the couple were in some ways America’s answer to Charles and Di. OK, Kennedy was voted People’s Sexiest Man Alive in 1988, which never happened to Charles. But the pair were preyed on by vulturous paparazzi and had their own tragic outcome — both were killed in a plane crash in 1999.”
James Jackson, The Times

“A new product from the Ryan Murphy brand is becoming ever less dependable a delight. Will it be a Nip/Tuck or Glee-level triumph? A return to inaugural American Horror Story form, as his recent outing The Beauty so nearly was? Or will it be something towards the other end of the scale, where the so-bad-it’s-bad, Kim-Kardashian-as-a-divorce-lawyer All’s Fair lurks? Hmm. The latest one is Love Story: John F Kennedy Jr & Carolyn Bessette. It is a nine-episode series that lasts roughly as long as the golden couple’s relationship did in real life and is (unlike All’s Fair) punishingly boring.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“You’ll want to watch this twice, once to uncover all the secrets and again to savour the extraordinary humour. This has ‘instant classic’ stamped all over it.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail