“It saps its juicy premise of all its fun, is po-faced and didactic rather than enjoyably preposterous”

Gossip Girl

Gossip Girl, BBC1

“It is almost impossible to follow, but that never mattered with the original. This one could survive it, too, were it not for two major flaws. One is a fatal earnestness, which dooms the endeavour from the off. Gone is the bouncy fleetness of the original. Instead, these are friends who pull each other up for peer-pressuring or fat-shaming or unkindness (before carrying on as before), puncturing all the bubbles and balloons that would otherwise keep the thing aloft. ”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“It saps its juicy premise of all its fun, is po-faced and didactic rather than enjoyably preposterous, and has about as much insight into Gen-Z mores as your average Sarah Vine column. Never has a teen drama felt more like the product of a pack of 40-year-olds.”
Adam White, The Independent

“This reboot is fun when being so droll — a high-society game of posts — but weaker when being slickly heartfelt in a standard teen-drama way.”
James Jackson, The Times

H20: The Molecule That Made Us, BBC4

“The ‘podcast style’ was a bit of a red herring, because this turned out to be straightforward science: pleasingly educational, graced by some dreamy visuals” 
James Jackson, The Times

“This was more Horizon than Life on Earth, with little in the way of wildlife apart from the dragonflies that manage to wing it from India to Africa on the back of monsoons. And unlike Attenborough, McEvers didn’t appear on camera, leaving the limelight to a variety of geologists, biologists and plant scientists”
Gerard Gilbert, The i

“All this melodrama and hyperventilation is probably very effective when chopped into 15-second morsels and posted by teenagers on social media. No doubt that’s what Kelly McEvers is trying to achieve with a ‘podcast-style documentary’. But it isn’t adult journalism, and it has no business on BBC4.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

Changing Rooms, Channel 4

“With ‘Neapolitan ice cream colours’ and green wall tiles like the inside of a railway station toilet. Mischief is fun, but these makeovers veered dangerously close to spite.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

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