The reviews are uniformly positive and unusually of one mind. Most critics see Charlie Brooker’s anthology as a 21st-century Twilight Zone, dark satire played with a straight face, and they admire how the opening episode takes an absurd premise about a prime minister and treats it as sober drama, making it both funny and tragic. The praise clusters on the writing, on its observations about social media and the crowd, and on the performances, with Rory Kinnear and Lindsay Duncan singled out.
The spread is narrow, from good to very good, and nobody dissents. What differs is how much each critic has seen. Most reviews cover only the premiere. Empire, having watched all three episodes, rates the final one as the standout. Paste, looking back a decade on, argues that the first series’ standalone stories and refusal of neat endings are what later runs lost. The reservation, such as it is, concerns what came after, not these episodes.