Critic Reviews

Parade's End is a television masterpiece.

Moment after moment the drama deepens, the rich complexity of Ford's characters make themselves felt in all their strangeness and variety.

You'll be pining for more once it's over. [1 Mar 2013, p.62]

The unfolding of the Parade’s End narrative has been directed (by Susanna White) and written to challenge--sometimes too much so. While you always understand the connections among the characters on “Downton,” you have to piece them together yourself in Parade’s End.... It’s the kind of demanding storytelling that differentiates “The Wire” from most other crime series.

Parade's End must be taken on its own terms, because it is offering something rare and provocative: a poetically precise consideration of what it means to be caught out of time, clinging to the lip of one era or reaching desperately for a foothold in the other.

The disconnect between propriety and reality keeps the miniseries on constant edge. The entire cast is fine, but Hall steals the show.

The direction by Susanna White is subtle, except for a too-frequent visual pun of kaleidoscopic, prism-like refractions to help us see that the world at the moment of Parade’s End is splintering into pieces. Cumberbatch pulls off the stoic-to-shell-shocked expressions of Tietjens, Hall is masterful in a demanding role and Clemens is suited to playing the fresh young thing.

HBO’S new miniseries Parade’s End won’t stop the “Downton Abbey” DTs. But it can soothe the pain with wonderful visuals and superb performances by Benedict Cumberbatch, Rebecca Hall and Adelaide Clemens.

Parade's End is often sad and even grim, full of complicated personalities who are more fascinating than likable. But the miniseries is engrossing in its portrait of two people stuck in roles they need to cast aside, but somehow unable to make the break.

Stoppard's storytelling structure has an odd rhythm to it, and White's direction can be both majestically beautiful and transitionally jarring. But combined, their choices allow Parade's End to achieve an exquisiteness, a sense of high art.