With Love, Meghan; The Sycamore Gap Mystery; The Abandons

“One is reminded almost immediately of the scene in Love Actually in which Alan Rickman is forced to endure Rowan Atkinson, as a shop assistant, adorning a Christmas gift for his bit on the side with every ribbon, aromatic and decorative plant imaginable. That’s how watching the ‘Holiday Special’ of ‘With Love, Meghan’ feels, except it goes on for 56 minutes and you are not having an exciting extramarital affair.”
Emily Bootle, The i

“It’s not a real special by any stretch; it’s more like the kind of YouTube content or radio programme that you might put on in the background as you do your tree or wrap your presents. White noise to dull the senses. It’s all a little Stepford Wives; not informative, fun, enjoyable or even aspirational. Because the people watching this, including me, will never have a Christmas like this.”
Hannah Ewens, The Independent

“Tennis player Naomi Osaka has never met Meghan before and, judging by her expression, won’t be meeting her again soon if she can help it. Their encounter is the most awkward section of an hour-long With Love, Meghan: Holiday Celebration in which Meghan, as ever, tries way too hard. The programme is quite mad and a little bit sad.”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph

“I would advise any viewers who are British, not in the acting profession and/or not married to the Duchess of Sussex to take as many anti-emetics as medically advisable, then assume the crash position.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“The pieces of the jigsaw of evidence that needed to be pieced together for the CPS — Graham’s Range Rover caught on camera, phone messages, boasts about their operation — could perhaps have been told in 20 minutes rather than over two parts. Yet the unveiling of each successive detail was absorbing, and there was a certain gleeful fascination in getting to see the footage of the men each being cornered during police interviews, their denials becoming increasingly desperate.”
James Jackson, The Times

“The police procedural elements are constructed with great skill. There is also a real sense of place, with drone footage of the landscape and interviews with people from the local community in Haltwhistle combining to paint a colourful picture of life in this corner of England.”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph

“This was a police investigation that had it all — a shocking crime, public outcry, dogged detectives, false leads, bodycam drama, tense interrogations… everything except blood.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“The wildly inflated sense of the film’s own importance is demonstrated by the fact that its original title was The Slaying at Sycamore Gap. The slaying. The slaying. Just before broadcast it was renamed The Sycamore Gap Mystery, but it is the original that better suits the risibly sombre tone of the programme and the gathering bathos as the 90 minutes – 90 minutes! – progress.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“Like most westerns, The Abandons drives you to distraction because it takes itself so very, very seriously. Perhaps when the US gets a bit older it will be able to laugh at itself a bit more, or at least let a bit more light and shade into the retellings of its origin story. But at the moment, the result is too often too heavy to take proper flight.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“Gillian Anderson is the television equivalent of a national treasure – and arrives on The Abandons fresh from rave reviews for her turn as an alcoholic mother in the acclaimed Troubles drama, The Trespasses. Lean Headey, by contrast, has been criminally underutilised since Game of Thrones – from which she was one of the few to emerge with dignity intact after its appalling final season. She deserves a showcase worthy of her fire-and-brimstone screen presence. But this woebegone western misses the target and instead shoots itself in the foot.”
Ed Power, The Telegraph

“As is the way these days, The Abandons is not about lone gunslingers or showdowns at high noon, although it keeps enough familiar motifs to satisfy the western itch: an unruly saloon bar, cattle, earthy language. Like Yellowstone it puts the emphasis on family and the protection of land, except that Angel Ridge is also a place where resilient women show their antiheroism.”
James Jackson, The Times