The Hour (UK)

It's a treat to be back in this world again, and perhaps by the end of this season I'll feel happier about the crime arc than I did about the spy stuff.

The Hour teems with flawed but driven professionals who, even at their worst, never come off as ridiculous as Newsroom's fools' gallery. The hours just fly by

The Hour is not "Breaking Bad" good, or "Mad Men" good, but it's close.

The Hour has never pretended to be anything other than a very classy potboiler filled with attractive people, one that puts its heroes into predicaments that wouldn't be out of place in a silent film while sneaking social and historical commentary into the margins.

As with "Mad Men," we all recognize the workplace dynamic here. And as in "Mad Men," it's satisfying to see it dramatized in such a fresh and knowing way.

[Marnie's] one element in the rich vein of personalities that The Hour only began to mine in its first season, and one of the many reasons the second season is looking very good indeed.

Bel and her staff are no longer young Turks shaking up the fusty old BBC; now they are, for better or worse, part of the mainstream news media, forced to question their own motivations as well as those of the Establishment. In the first two episodes anyway, this makes for a more sophisticated storytelling, a drama of adults who must take responsibility for decisions of the mind as well as the heart.

The Hour's charms are many, but chief among them is its celebration of intelligence and diligence as cardinal, animating virtues.

The Hour has some pacing issues--there are sludgy patches that could use a bit more zip and energy--but overall, the show creates a delectable, specific world that's very easy to glide into and inhabit.

I have a sneaking suspicion that, over its next four installments, The Hour will ratchet-up the drama and intrigue and retain the excellence it's achieved thus far.

I'll take Hour's rather sour worldview--deadlines in deadly times--over the grand uplift of HBO's The Newsroom. In a nanosecond. [3 Dec 2012, p.44]

There are real pleasures with "The Hour," but the hour (actually, about an hour and 15 minutes Wednesday night) ticks by far too slowly.

At least in the early going, the current season avoids the sentimental speechifying about truth and justice that became increasingly prevalent in Season 1. And the let's-put-on-a-broadcast scenes are still reliably entertaining.

It's too early to tell whether the new season will have the intelligent plotting, tense pacing, and superb cohesion Morgan and her actors brought to the first. But it's off to a good start.

This second Hour remains an interesting historical document, but at least initially appears more determined to replicate qualities that distinguished the first rather than advance them.