Critic Reviews

One of the best TV programs you'll find in this or any season.

This magnificent six-part Masterpiece adaption.... In a powerfully sustained performance of subtle sorrow and steely resolve, Rylance reveals a man who takes little pleasure in carrying out his master's harrowing whims. The true pleasure is entirely the viewers. [6-19 Apr 2015, p.14]

Wolf Hall really is one of the great pleasures of the small screen this year, even if it doesn't initially make much of an effort (like Cromwell) to curry your favor. But stick with this one. The rewards are considerable.

It takes some while before the immensity of the history it covers dawns on a viewer of this extraordinary series, so deftly is that history--the reign of Henry VIII (Damian Lewis), Henry’s court, the dawn of the Protestant Reformation in England--woven into drama here.

It doesn’t matter if you know precisely where this story leads (whose head goes to which chopping block), Wolf Hall is about as compellingly and meticulously crafted as television gets.

The script is a miracle of compression and architecture, bearing loads that ought to be impossible. The first did justice to 1,200 pages of Mantel’s perfect prose in six hour-long episodes; this distils the essence of her trilogy’s last 900. .... Six hours of magic.

There is no small thrill in watching Rylance, at last, go through the gears. .... Damian Lewis is excellent as Henry, his body and country and wives failing him. .... Few moments of inelegance stand out in Peter Straughan’s otherwise superb scripts, which are marvels of concision.

TV's best of the year, so far.

An event. .... Rylance’s Cromwell is an astonishing mix of empathy, doom and hope. .... The dialogue is fluid and of its time, so much so that you forget someone wrote it (Peter Straughan did), or that it was directed (by Peter Kosminsky).

Altogether, it’s an arresting piece of historical fiction that charts the journey of a man who is always one bad conversation away from death; we may be 500 years removed from these events, but this series ensures you can still hear the sharpening of the axe.