Most critics are relieved. The consensus is that a series spun from the Coen brothers’ 1996 film, an idea more than one reviewer admits they distrusted, turns out to work: it borrows the tone and the Minnesota-nice manners and then builds its own story inside them. Praise clusters on the cast. Billy Bob Thornton’s Malvo is named again and again, Martin Freeman’s Lester Nygaard and Allison Tolman’s Molly Solverson nearly as often, and the reviews like the mix of dark comedy and sudden violence.
The reservations are smaller and scattered. Vulture finds parts of the setup schematic and notes a strain of misogyny in it; Den of Geek is uneasy about how hard the pilot leans on the film’s name. The one real dissent is The Times, which grants the series is clever but finds it dull, too fussy over detail to hold attention on television. Everyone else lands somewhere between good and enthusiastic.