A history, a tragedy and at times a brutal thriller, Disney’s nine-part series is a “sensational” amalgam, said Benji Wilson in The Daily Telegraph. Adapted from Patrick Radden Keefe’s acclaimed non-fiction book about the Troubles, it weaves together at least seven narratives, with characters including Gerry Adams, the IRA bombers Dolours and Marian Price, and Jean McConville, the widowed mother of ten who was bundled into a van in 1972 and never seen alive again.
It begins as “thrilling” cops-and-robbers stuff: the IRA members of the 1970s are presented as folk heroes taking on the “stuffed-shirt” Brits, and there is a needling sense that the conflict is being romanticised; but stick with it, because the series develops into something more “elegiac and profound”.
This “ultimately sober-minded” series is a powerful reminder of a tragic era, said Ed Power in The Irish Times. It accepts the romantic appeal of the IRA’s cause to people like Dolours Price – played with “devilish energy” as a young woman by Lola Petticrew and as a “guilt-ridden shell” by Maxine Peake – but it does not neglect the IRA’s victims.
I disagree, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian: the series is indeed highly watchable, but it’s too sympathetic to its main characters. The Price sisters, for instance, were involved in a bomb attack on the Old Bailey in 1973 in which around 200 people were injured, yet there is little reckoning with that: “‘Say Nothing’ comes to feel as though it has left too much unsaid.”