This England

Branagh as Johnson is fantastic, after 15 minutes in you forget you are not watching the real Boris. The pace and style of the series reminds me of 2011's Contagion. The music and sound design leaves me with a continuous feeling of tension hanging in the air. The hospital scenes looks authentic, you can clearly see how misled and thus desperate the medical personnel is at times. The whole series takes you back to those days back in February and March 2020 when the whole world came to a standstill. And when noone knew when, or if this pandemic will ever be over again. A must-watch with great acting!

This series is so raw it's hard to watch at times. I had to pinch myself that only 18 months ago we were in lockdown, stuck at home, despairing at panic buying and praying for a vaccine. This dramatization is extremely well acted, all the main players are well represented, and there is a superb portrayal of the behind-the-scenes pandemonium as the pandemic progresses. The episodes covering Care Homes are especially harrowing, as is the sense of despair in the NHS. The flaw I think is that we learn very little of the virus itself, the molecular biology, the cause, how it spread, vaccine development etc. Instead the focus is on suffering, loss and political ineptitude. So it's part of the picture but not all of it.

The show is keen to point out its fiction based on facts, however, the scenes in the care homes and hospitals are trully heart breaking. The country was clearly unprepared for c19. The actors in the care homes portray the tragedy with care and perfection. We had daily figures from the government during the pandemic, but the stories portrayed in the programme really bring home the individual tragedy and devastating stories happening all accross their country, personal stories behind the figures.

A great, and deeply thought provoking programme. The acting all round was brilliant, in particular the elderly patients who succumbed to the awful disease.

This England is an excellent dramatic series, perhaps too close, that portrays a very difficult period of time not only for England but for the whole world, in which some governments were incompetent, they did not know how to face the pandemic.

Being honest I have to admit that I watched the series to see Kenneth Branagh work, it's fascinating how he gets the voice, the gestures, the physicality, he becomes Boris, but what makes his performance perfect is that he doesn't judge the character, he doesn't ridicules not condemns him, Branagh shows Boris for the viewer to judge. The rest of the cast and crew also do a great job. It's worth the time, sometimes a little hard to watch but it's important not to forget what happened and where everyone was.

I was really looking forward to this, but my only criticism is that it didn't really know what it was trying to do.

It's a tough job to cover everything that happened because there was simply too much going on to fit into the time allowed, but no mention of Track&Trace and the PPE scandals was very odd to say the least.

Some judicious editing would have made this more engaging because we don't learn much from continually watching people walking around and saying hello to their colleagues.

All the bits about the dog (Dylan) should never have made it to the final cut.

6/10 because it's above average but nowhere near as insightful as it could have been.