For a series that features “three murders including a slashed throat within the first four minutes”, Netflix’s “Black Doves” is surprisingly jolly, said Carol Midgley in The Times. A comic spy series, it stars Keira Knightley as Helen Webb, “a seemingly perfect, fragrant political wife” who is actually a spy, passing the secrets she learns from her defence secretary husband (Andrew Buchan) to the shadowy espionage company she works for, which then sells them to the highest bidder.
The “starry cast” also includes Sarah Lancashire as the company’s spymaster, and Ben Whishaw as a hired killer. Is it any good? “Well, if you fancy something that feels like a mating experiment between ‘Gangs of London’ (for the body count and violence), ‘Love Actually’ (for the glossy Christmassy backdrop and festive songs) with a dash of ‘Slow Horses’ (for the dry wit and espionage)”, then you will probably be entertained – and it certainly looks very nice.
With its serious cast and sombre trailers, I’d expected this to be a “straight-faced thriller”, said Rebecca Nicholson in The Guardian. In fact, it delivers “pulpy popcorn TV”, and is the kind of show “that it’s best not to overthink”, because it is deliberately “daft and overblown”. By episode three, “its gleeful excess had won me over”.
It’s pretty uneven, said Chris Bennion in The Daily Telegraph, but it “is a crash-bang helter-skelter ride that improves across every one of its six episodes”, and overall it has “enough moments of high entertainment to get you through the kinks”.