“The Iris Affair” is “a delightfully preposterous new thriller” that’s packed with twists, said Lucas Hill-Paul in The Mirror. Made by “Luther” creator Neil Cross, Sky’s new show stars Niamh Algar as Iris, a “maths whizz” and genius codebreaker who completes a cryptic treasure hunt designed by venture capitalist Cameron Beck (Tom Hollander). He is so impressed by her astonishing abilities that he recruits her for a secret task: unlocking “a mind-bogglingly complex set of codes” to gain access to a supercomputer so advanced, it could solve climate change, cure cancer or end world hunger. There’s just one problem: the computer, named “Charlie Big Potatoes”, is fast becoming sentient.
A film with a Bond-franchise budget might just have done this plot justice, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph. Here, however, “we’re operating with the production values of a mid-range car advert, and it all feels a bit lame”. All the usual clichés are deployed, from the strangely attractive “antisocial maths genius” and the wall covered in Post-it notes, to the men who are trained to shoot guns yet keep missing their targets.
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