Make That Movie; Star City

We are coming out of a decade-long tailspin where television seemed afraid of comedy for the sake of comedy, and tried to justify everything with trauma. Had Make That Movie been attempted a couple of years ago, there is every chance that a development executive would have tried to shoehorn in a subplot where we learn that Campbell only made these films as a way to psychologically dissociate from his abusive childhood. Thank God that time has passed, because what we’re left with is so ostentatiously silly that it deserves to be paraded around the streets. This show is a celebration, not just of bad films in all their various forms, but of comedy as an artform.
Stuart Heritage, The Guardian

[Sam] Campbell’s shtick is incongruity, and by definition, it means that Make That Movie is all over the place. It begins with a junior inkjet technician called Mick writing to Sam and proposing a film in which a man and a woman can both turn into snakes – but only one of them can turn into a snake at a time…Is stupid funny? Is wibbledry and free association humour? Is the guy who says the rudest thing he can think of at the worst possible moment a maverick or just a jerk? You come out of Make That Movie thinking all these things at once.
Benji Wilson, The Telegraph 

Star City has none of the glossy blandness that For All Mankind did at the beginning, before it found its feet, and none of the soapiness that has occasionally beset it since…As much as it will offer space history fans a deep dive into the “what if?” possibilities surrounding the intoxicating fundamental premise, it offers a broader audience something equally fascinating: how human nature warps in the absence of trust, how people survive intolerable stress, and what they will do to be free. All mankind is here.
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

At first I wasn’t sure this was quite working. An alternative history of the space race set in a 1970s where the Russians have landed on the moon first, and told from their side behind the Iron Curtain, its premise is tantalising. But the accents? Anything but Russian. Instead, distractingly the cast speak in their natural British voices even though they’re hardcore cosmonauts and KGB bosses… But then you think, if everybody spoke in a stylised Russian accent, could we really take this drama seriously? And we should because it settles down into something grown-up, impressive and most definitely worthy of our time.
James Jackson, The Times