Killing Eve

After a brilliant first season, Killing Eve lost some of its mojo in the second, and seems more listless in the third. Built around a game of cat and mouse between an office-bound MI6 investigator and a mercurial assassin, it continues to offer darkly amusing moments thanks to its splendid cast, but at this point, the main thing the show seems to be killing is time.

Like the second series, it is still a high-quality, high-wire act, but it cannot quite match the verve and wit of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s original episodes. A further burden now – and one shouldered by any subsequent series after one based on a cat-and-mouse premise – is that the artifice is showing.

[Killing Eve now feels like] a copy of its former self. The edges are now duller, the lines less distinct. If there was ever a show that would have benefited from being a limited series, it is Killing Eve.

“Killing Eve” isn’t a bad show now, but it’s a different show, in depressing ways — less vital, more ordinary. It is still shocking here and there but largely devoid of surprise. A mordant and sexy comic thriller edged with terror has become a competent psychodrama bordered with sentimentality. The air has gone out of it.

The show is committed to fascinating female characters—and it’s particularly rewarding to watch Oh perform her character’s deep grief and despair, lending surprising dignity to her disheveled sweatpants and plastic bags. But something about the humor skews horribly wrong. Villanelle has become so murderous that it's difficult to enjoy her humor. ... Killing Eve feels safe.

Season 3 extends the thinning plot and has trouble finding its mojo in the first four episodes reviewed here. ... It takes it quite a few episodes to get off the floor, into the shower, and back in the fold — and no matter how good Oh and Comer still are (and they are), it feels like a slog