Killing Eve Review

The first series is as close to a perfect genre reinvention as television managed in its decade. Phoebe Waller-Bridge takes Luke Jennings's lean assassin novellas and finds the joke and the ache inside them: an under-used MI5 analyst and a killer who dresses for the catwalk, each more interested in the other than in anyone else alive. Sandra Oh plays Eve's hunger as something she barely understands, and Jodie Comer's Villanelle, a psychopath with a comedian's timing, is one of the breakout performances of the era. Both won major awards, and Fiona Shaw's dry spymaster Carolyn took a BAFTA of her own.

It is gorgeous to look at, too, moving through Paris, Tuscany, Berlin, Amsterdam and Rome with a costume department that became famous in its own right.

The trouble is structural. The show hands the writing to a new head writer every series, and after Emerald Fennell's strong second run it loses the thread and much of its wit. The third series keeps its leads apart for too long, the fourth leans on a shadowy conspiracy nobody cares about, and the finale lands on lists of the worst of its time. Judged on its first two series it is exceptional; the whole run is less than the sum of its parts.