The Paradise
PBS | BBC | BBC One | Release Date: September 25, 2012
CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
71
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 9 Critic Reviews
Positive:
7
Mixed:
2
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
80
VarietyBrian LowryOct 7, 2013
Season 1 Review: Impeccably cast, extremely handsome, predictably soapy and a trifle slow moving, it’s another first-rate costume drama. Read full review
80
Wall Street JournalDorothy RabinowitzOct 7, 2013
Season 1 Review: A spectacularly entertaining enterprise. Read full review
80
New York Daily NewsDavid HinckleyOct 7, 2013
Season 1 Review: The dramas, rivalries, kindnesses and treacheries begin almost at once, and as in all the best PBS series, they are well-drawn. Read full review
75
The A.V. ClubZack HandlenOct 7, 2013
Season 1 Review: For now, though, it’s comfortable, but inessential. The performances blur together, as actors deliver lines in a competent, polite way, and everything is filmed in a hazy glow. There’s nothing wrong with any of it. Read full review
70
TV Guide MagazineMatt RoushOct 7, 2013
Season 1 Review: Paradise is based on a Zola novel but is redolent of Dickens, envisioning the store as an insular world full of colorful characters, with its sentimental and romantic upstairs-downstairs intrigues opulently packaged. Read full review
70
Los Angeles TimesRobert LloydOct 7, 2013
Season 1 Review: A pleasingly soapy story of beating hearts and changing times. Read full review
70
Boston GlobeMatthew GilbertOct 7, 2013
Season 1 Review: It will engage--though not obsess--those of us who enjoy parsing out the morals and manners of another time and place. Read full review
60
PopMattersMaysa HattabOct 7, 2013
Season 1 Review: If the daily competitions for commissions don’t quite match the savagery of the male-on-male contests in Glengarry Glenross or In The Company of Men, they remain vicious enough to give the otherwise fluffy plotting a little bite. Read full review
50
The New York TimesMike HaleOct 7, 2013
Season 1 Review: It’s the last of the big-four British costume dramas of recent years to make its American public-television debut, after “Downton Abbey,” “Call the Midwife” and “Mr. Selfridge,” and it’s the most frivolous of the bunch, which is saying quite a bit. Read full review
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