Critic Reviews

With the recent Ebola scare, the show’s premise is timely. Plus, it’s a trippy, roller coaster ride as we learn, along with Cole and Cassandra, who is responsible for killing 7 billion people.

For a show steeped in apocalyptic dread and regret, 12 Monkeys has a surprisingly light sense of humor. It helps that the cast is so rock solid. ... Here’s a world-bending time odyssey with a profound adoration for the ghosts of TV junk past.

For as long as it has, 12 Monkeys works beautifully as a fast-paced sci-fi thriller that is actually far more complex.

As actors, Stanford and Schull have to convince TV audiences that they are not dishing out reheated versions of the performances Bruce Willis and Madeleine Stowe did in the original. Thankfully, that's not the case and these two actors are quite compelling as a couple of lost souls trying desperately to make things right.

The show only stumbles in the smaller moments. Most egregious are the lame pop culture references, with endless quoting of iconic 80s movies. ... Quibbling aside, 12 Monkeys is undeniably superior science fiction.

The first two episode of 12 Monkeys move along crisply and effectively.

It’s Stanford who will hold this thing together, and he seems up to the challenge. I’m ready to look at this whole story again with fresh eyes. It may not be quite on the level of a “Battlestar Galactica” overhaul, but, then, its source material isn’t nearly as campy.

Intelligent adaptation absent the dark humor, satire--or horror--of the original.

It's different enough from the original that you may be better off looking at it fresh, as a promising and more straightforward (okay, relatively straightforward) sci-fi adventure series with the requisite shadow conspiracy and, for those in the past, a looming Armageddon.

The script sometimes ties itself in knots trying to explain all the theoretical physics and horology that drive the plot, but in the early going, it hangs together pretty well.