The Paper; Call My Agent!; A Killer Story

“Ned is a carbon copy of Apple TV’s Ted Lasso, the US football coach who instils team spirit in a struggling Premier League club. If you liked that show, it’s well worth trying a few half-hour episodes of The Paper. I enjoyed it, but anything that sends up my profession is likely to get me laughing — such as the junior hack who was trying to get his head around the sneaky trick of drafting an election story before the results are actually in. Scratching his head, he demanded: ‘So, whatever we write here, just happens tomorrow?’ British comedian Tim Key, a master of the one-liner, is playing his usual fish-out-of-water type, but he is very much at home with the rapidfire pattern of US sitcom dialogue, with a joke in every line.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“You get the sense that this could be The Paper’s chance to become as big as its mother show, and the producers are throwing everything at the wall to get it there. By no means does the show have a guaranteed future – a recent interview with Gleeson hinted at the uncertainty of a third season – but a show like this deserves to come back year after year. A warm, funny workplace sitcom that actually has something to say is a rare thing indeed. It would be a terrible thing to see it go the way of local newspapers.”
Stuart Heritage, The Guardian

“Quel dommage… everyone’s favourite French sitcom has been given a spin-off movie and it’s, well, a bit bof. Not as bad as the feature-length incarnations of Sex and the City, but it suffers from the same problems as those films and many other TV spin-offs: a pressure to chase spectacle and the perils of stretching a storyline to the 90-minute mark. Even George Clooney at his most charmingly self-effacing can’t save it.”
Ed Potton, The Times

“The only real quibble is that a film can’t quite capture the more mundane comings and goings of the talent agency that was such an integral part of the show’s appeal. But with unresolved storylines from the show’s last run on TV hinting that a new agency could rise out of the ashes, there remains the hope of more wonderful chaos to come.”
Eleanor Halls, Telegraph

“HBO is no stranger to true crime, though its offerings tend to be more prestige than your average, with documentaries such as the unrelenting sex cult nightmare The Vow and The Yogurt Shop Murders, a measured reinvestigation into the deaths of four teenage girls in Texas in the 90s. They have form, too, in drily funny sagas, such as McMillions, about a high-stakes conspiracy to fix the McDonald’s Monopoly promotion. Rarely are their documentaries both solemn and bizarro, with the exception perhaps of The Jinx. An unnerving tale of millionaire real estate heir turned convicted murderer Robert Durst, it occasionally lingered on the stranger points of his story, like the time he shoplifted a $6 sandwich for kicks. All this makes sense, really: it’s not like most homicides lend themselves to a deadpan retelling. A Killer Story is not laugh-out-loud funny, either. But this very meta three-parter manages to tell not one but two killer stories, one disturbing and the other absurd.”
Hannah J Davies, The Guardian