The reviews are close to unanimous: seven of eight are warm. Critics call the series a political satire for the age of the spin doctor, a Yes, Minister with the manners removed, and praise the way its semi-improvised, fly-on-the-wall style makes ministerial chaos ring true. The praise gathers almost entirely around Peter Capaldi’s Malcolm Tucker, whose inventive swearing and the fear he spreads through every corridor are named again and again as the show’s engine.
The one real dissent comes from the Telegraph, which finds the later series still funny but diminished, an echo of its earlier self once the move to coalition politics leaves Tucker without a peak to occupy. Elsewhere the reservations are slight: Radio Times notes a tonal shift in the finale, and several critics writing after 2012 spend as much time on the show’s influence over later satires as on the episodes themselves. The spread is narrow, apart from that single outlier.