Strangers

If ever a series got huge advertising, this was it, Cinema, TV, online, wherever you looked, it was visible. For good reason, it was clearly big budget drama.

It starts off well, the first few episodes are intriguing, good characters, and a deep level of intrigue. Sadly, because it's an eight part serial, there comes a midpoint lull, and it does suffer from being padded. Plenty of scenes of Jonah walking through the streets of Hong Kong doing very little.

Fortunately from episode six onwards, the show gains real momentum, and truly delivers some excellent moments.

I love the Hong Kong setting, the buildings are incredible, and it's nice to see something a little different. John Simm is superb throughout, supported well by Tim McInnerny, Emilia Fox, and Anthony Hayes in particular.

In summary, great location work, plenty of intrigue, but it does suffer from being too long. 8/10

I liked this show and found it captivating. The writing was lacking at times and like another reviewer felt the handing over of cell phone in scene 2 was not realistic and far fetched. This show has the potential, with better writing, to be really good.

John Simm is such a good actor because like all really good actors his acting is invisible. Without him this might not have been so satisfying. (Emilia Fox is easy on the eye but let's face it her acting is barely passable.) Many other reviews complain about the lack of pace but I found it just fine and the plotting and overall writing was good. The series captured the claustrophobia of Hong Kong, Kowloon and Macau very well which gave the series lots of atmosphere. Because I'd skimmed a couple of reviews prior to watching the series I expected the last episode to be a disappointment but to the contrary I found the wrap up to be totally satisfying. And it's all worth it for John Simm.

Slow start but good acting & seems to be speeding up now. Shame about some of the technical details, for instance, the voice message left for Jonah by his wife being altered by the HK police. Voice messages are not stored on the phone, they are saved on the network providers servers, to delete a message would be simple, but to edit a message would be impossible as the HK police would need direct access to a UK network server, NOT GOING TO HAPPEN.

If you're impatient for action sequences then this isn't for you, but I really enjoyed the slow build of this show. It kept my interest enough early and as it got into later episodes it really turned up the heat and had a very satisfying finish and ending. I also really enjoyed the setting among the British-Asian mix of Hong Kong and they really capture it throughout, not just a couple of tracking shots and then the rest is filmed in Vancouver or something. The lead character can be frustrating and hard to cheer for at times but he grows from experience over the course of the show. Definitely worth watching if you can appreciate storytelling and a slowly revealed mystery as opposed to an action thriller.