- Network: BBC America , ITV , INGTV
- Series Premiere Date: Mar 4, 2013
Watch Now
Where To Watch
| Buy on |
|
| Stream On |
|
| Stream On |
|
| Stream On |
|
| Stream On |
|
Critic Reviews
- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
-
In an embarrassment of riches, this series is littered with numerous quality acting performances. It's just a thing of beauty all the way around.
-
In BBC America's shattering and brilliantly paced eight-episode Broadchurch, a high point of a summer already teeming with terrific drama, you'll get a solution in a lot less time than it took The Killing to reveal the murderer of Rosie Larsen, and with considerably more cumulative emotional impact.
-
We can all be grateful for a series this awe-inspiringly exceptional.
-
Broadchurch manages to be both a finely crafted piece of suspenseful entertainment and also an emotionally resonant examination of grief, loss and moral confusion.
-
It’s among the best detective shows--and perhaps even among the best dramas--in several years. It will break your heart and keep you guessing all the way through.
-
Broadchurch, with its recurring crashing waves wiping some slates clean, is thoroughly captivating from start to finish.
-
As always, execution matters. Broadchurch's is practically note-perfect.
-
Masterfully written by Chibnall and brilliantly executed by a superb ensemble cast.
-
Broadchurch is a stunning achievement in great writing and powerful acting.
-
It's beautifully constructed, cleverly fitted with red herrings and capacious enough to house a community of suspects. The emotional payoff is sensational, and so is the acting. [12 Aug 2013]
-
The acting here is first-rate, and the two adversarial cops investigating the case--Alec Hardy (David Tennant) and Ellie Miller (Olivia Colman)--despise each other just enough to create a palatable tension. The second episode is even more provocative.... Riveting.
-
A gorgeously realized and emotive thriller.
-
Broadchurch answers your summer prayers for top-notch drama.
-
Broadchurch is a police procedural, and an effective one, but what renders it special is the way it tracks the ways that physical and emotional violence haunts everyone in the town.
-
The complex impact of the crime--and of its investigation, news coverage and town reaction--is the real story here, laid out in the decidedly ordinary faces and raw silent spaces that British drama delivers so well.
-
Broadchurch is a gripping portrait of small-town paranoia.
-
As a murder mystery, Broadchurch is satisfyingly complex (even if the accents may take some getting used to). As an exploration of grief it is even better, with Ms. Whittaker and Ms. Colman pointing the way. But in its long, slow unfolding Broadchurch is most magnificent in another sense--as an elegy for the happy innocence of ignorance.
-
Broadchurch doesn't come with many stylistic flourishes--it's a pretty straightforward crime story. But the care given to its characters and the damage the crime inflicts on the town make it one of the best scripted series of the summer.
-
A dozen characters, played by the inevitably glorious assortment of British actors, crisscross in an astonishingly fluid game of cat's cradle, bringing this small town miraculously to life but never straying too far, or too absurdly, from the narrative through line.
-
It’s a beautiful downer, a perceptive and acute one, whose empathy distinguishes it from some of its peers.
-
The first few episodes of this import promise no slack--and plenty of poignancy--as the story line moves closer to the truth of the matter.
-
Broadchurch is beautifully crafted: well filmed, well cast, well scored, atmospheric without being a drag. It also has a striking mixture of cruel insight and sentimental warmth that elevates it above cheaper concoctions.
-
An engrossing drama about a modern seaside town that comes unraveled with the mysterious death of a young boy.
-
It’s not just that Broadchurch demonstrates that it is possible to reinvigorate something as tired as the hunt-for-a-killer genre with solid, engaging craftsmanship--though it does--but that unlike so many in the genre it is inordinately emotionally generous.
-
For all the familiar elements here, however, nothing feels like a gimmick. It’s a crime-and-cop story with enough time to paint detailed pictures of all the people the murder affects.
-
What Broadchurch has to offer, beyond its central performances and its intelligent but not particularly original plot, is mood: a tasty icing of gloom and foreboding that leans heavily on the music of Olafur Arnalds and the cinematography of Matt Gray, whose shots from every possible angle of the dramatic cliffs behind the Broadchurch beach are essential to the show’s ambience.
-
Ultimately, after eight episodes that wax and wane in intensity, viewers learn whose worldview emerges as the accurate one in this case--Hardy's pessimistic take on human nature or Ellie's more positive outlook. In a small town where everyone knows his or her neighbor, unmasking the killer is almost as wrenching as the crime itself.
-
Despite some flaws, Broadchurch is beautifully filmed, sharply directed and intensely acted.
-
While the show’s payoff is likely to strike many as strained and unsatisfying, as well as disturbing, its raison d’etre is as much about the atmospherics and the getting there, with the twists trumping the actual whodunit.
-
Broadchurch excels at showing the awkward moments between the briskly delivered plot points, and the small details of voice and gesture that define communities in mourning (or guilty panic), and it has the good sense not to overdo anything.... And yet there's something fundamentally unsatisfying about the whole thing, as smart and intricately structured as it is--and it has nothing whatsoever to do with any writing or acting or filmmaking issues, and everything to do with the fact that we've just been to this particular narrative well too many times in 2013.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
-
Positive: 280 out of 322
-
Mixed: 13 out of 322
-
Negative: 29 out of 322
-
Aug 17, 2013
-
Aug 10, 2013
-
Aug 21, 2013