The reviews are unanimous in their approval, and most of them say the same thing about why. John Cleese’s performance as the hotel proprietor is the centre of nearly every piece: the manic physical business, the timing, the way the scripts build a small grievance into total collapse. Several critics treat the twelve episodes as a benchmark for British sitcom writing, and the pieces written around the 50th anniversary argue that the cruelty and snobbery still play as sharply as they did on first broadcast.
Reservations are scarce and the spread is narrow. The one cooler notice, from The Times, comes from a critic who admits his enthusiasm lapsed for a while before a fresh viewing restored it, and even that piece ends on the show’s side. Two of the later reviews spend as much time on the reissued DVD commentaries as on the episodes. The Guardian was already calling it the comedy hit of the season in 1975, so the praise has held steady for half a century.