Seven Dials sits comfortably in that upper tier. It pulls off the difficult trick of making something feel both nimble and reassuringly familiar – a period caper that glides through gilded country piles and shadowy streets.
here are lazy shortcuts to characterisation, with several players reduced to little more than narrative cogs. But as disposable entertainment goes, Run Away is effective hokum. And sometimes, particularly on New Year’s Day, that’s precisely what the patient requires.
While it’s garnished throughout with nice visual touches, Death by Lightning is not without longueurs: the first episode, in particular, feels a little like sitting through a fusty lecture on the politics of the Gilded Age. Not helping its cause is a script from Mike Makowsky that, on occasion, makes the whole thing feel like a belated PR exercise for America’s most unsung president.
Without Herrero, the show has lost a scintilla of charm, resorting once or twice to heavy-handed twists reminiscent of a soap opera (one subplot involves the most Machiavellian of agents arriving from a rival firm). ... I’m nit-picking, but only because Call My Agent! has consistently set the bar so high. As for the ending, the show deserves kudos for resisting the temptation to pump up the poignancy or deliver some corny resolution.
