Critic Reviews

Danny Boyle--but more so his co-creator Robert Jones and executive producer-lead writer Jesse Armstrong--has created a layered analysis of a failing system, and, true to its satirical inception, he doesn't let anyone off the hook.

The first episode is as thrilling as it is hilarious. [9 Jan 2015, p.74]

A scabrous, profane and darkly funny satire.

What it lacks in depth, Babylon makes up for in range and sudden brilliant commentary.

A series whose undercurrent of fatalism might be unpleasant if the characters weren’t so corrosively funny.

A pretty gritty and compelling drama.

The resonance of this drama with our lives today alone makes it worth a look.

The in-the-field story lines, with their affairs and guilt and post-traumatic stress, tend toward the sentimental, and the series as a whole is weaker for trying to have it both ways--to be both a no-holds-barred, absurdist satire about the primacy of image-making and a straightforward drama about the nobility of public service.... But the jokes are pretty good over all.... And there are nice performances.

The nastiness of Babylon is refreshing, even while the writing fails to support either the level of acting or the atmosphere, which aspires to something far more clever than what the writers ... have delivered.

Though Babylon is pleasant and reasonably well executed, there's not too much to grab on to at the center of the drama; it makes moves toward engagement of knotty issues, only to ultimately skate along their surface. But Nesbitt is typically excellent and the show's depiction of London, its cops and its cynical politics can be diverting.