The reviews are warm across the board. Most critics describe a series that starts as a murder mystery and becomes something else: a slow, detailed account of how the justice system grinds people down, and how chance and prejudice decide who gets convicted. Praise gathers on the writing of Richard Price and Steven Zaillian, on a New York setting several find immersive enough to forgive the plot its gaps, and on two performances: Riz Ahmed as the accused and John Turturro as the eczema-afflicted defence lawyer.
Where they part is over pace. Collider finds it a slog in places, and Paste, the coolest of the eight, thinks the female characters are thin and the handling of race uneven, while admiring how ordinary the Pakistani-American family at its centre is allowed to be. Variety notes holes in the central mystery and does not much mind. The spread is narrow: nobody dislikes it, and the only argument is how much patience it earns.