Jimmy McGovern’s prison dramas are always a “difficult watch” but his third and final instalment of “Time” is a “horror story”, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph.
It’s set in the “roiling hell” of a young offenders’ institution, where the inmates are often locked up for 23 hours a day to stop them from attacking each other. The only returning character is Marie-Louise (Siobhan Finneran), the “non-judgemental” prison chaplain who brings a “stillness and kindness which act as much-needed respite from the chaos”.
David Tennant gives “one of his best-ever performances” as corrections officer Bobby Bailey, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. Although “wearied by the job” and returning home each day to an unhappy marriage, he is “not entirely devoid of compassion for the lads in his care”.
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Many of the young actors are making their TV debut but the quality of their performances is “astonishing”. The boys’ pain and anger is brought powerfully to life by McGovern and his co-writer Sam Bailey; they do a “wonderful, terrifying job of conveying the kinetic energy pent up and desperate for release, and the seething fury ever threatening to erupt, in every scene”. This portrait of masculinity “probably won’t garner the attention that Jack Thorne’s ‘Adolescence’ did. But it should”.
McGovern has managed “brilliantly to recapture the suffocating, febrile, terrifying climate of prison” once again, said Carol Midgley in The Times. Tennant’s “moral ‘journey’” proves fascinating, and the scenes with Finneran “quietly trying to connect with these troubled young men amid her own heartbreak are some of the finest of the series”.
The series is “not entirely without fault”, said Abby Robinson in Radio Times. Some of the dialogue in the closing scenes feels “at odds with the more grounded style” of the rest of the series, and there is one “unforeseen moment that feels unnecessarily cruel and designed to provoke a reaction, rather than further” the show’s themes. In all, though, “Time” is a “moving, tense and riveting watch”. This latest “urgent” instalment “cements its place as one of the most important shows on British television”.
