Critic Reviews

[A] cool yet intensely emotional British crime series. [24 Jun 2013, p.40]

I'd say that The Fall is a deeply moral crime thriller, but that description is too boring for a drama that's electric with suspense and erotic tension and pulpy cliff-hangers. Anderson's performance is riveting.

The Fall is a top-flight mystery that taps into political tensions in Northern Ireland and the troubling undercurrent of violence against women.

The stately new season unfolds as though it has never heard the phrase “hurry up,” closely tracking a serial killer who is no longer killing, a police department that makes no mistakes, and a narrative that contains no red herrings.

Frankly put, [Jamie Dornan's Spector is] boring, and not in the fascinating way the show itself can be in its aforementioned moments.... Luckily, Anderson is there to save him, both as an ideal to strive for--as fans will see in the season's 90-minute finale--and a redeeming grace for the show.

Some of these moments are memorable and stark. More are soporific. Both lend themselves to The Fall’s tone: these days, slow is what passes for serious. Anderson’s performance is what makes The Fall worth watching.

It’s a fine show, relying on slow-building tension rather than the gory shock value of series like “The Following,” and the five-episode arc now on Netflix is worth a look if you haven’t had your fill of cat-and-mouse dynamics.... Oddly, the character developed the least may be Ms. Anderson’s.

When it's firing on all cylinders, though, the third season of The Fall is an unusually meditative, self-possessed piece of television, one that actually earns the "psychological thriller" title that too often gets thrown at anything related to a serial killer.

Mr. Cubitt has set up a parallel between Gibson and Spector and wants to suggest that she, too, isn’t in full control of her sexual impulses. But he hasn’t made the parallel interesting, and it makes Gibson a less believable character, despite Ms. Anderson’s fine performance.

As good as Anderson is throughout, her Stella suffers from a Season 3 lack of development--we learn nothing about her in this new season that we did not know from the previous two (apart from a couple of small autobiographical details dropped in the final hour). And some characters who had been important to the series--I’m thinking particularly of John Lynch’s cop Burns--recede or fall away in disappointing ways.