Critical response Season 1 On
Rotten Tomatoes, the first season has an approval rating of 96% based on 155 reviews, with an average rating of 8.3/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Seductive and surprising,
Killing Eves twist on the spy vs. spy concept rewards viewers with an audaciously entertaining show that finally makes good use of Sandra Oh's talents." On
Metacritic, it has a weighted average score of 83 out of 100 based on 22 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". Jenna Scherer, writing in
Rolling Stone, described
Killing Eve as "hilarious, bloody, unclassifiable" and idiosyncratic, "a stylish story of obsession and
psychopathy that's disarmingly warm and lived-in". In the context of
Vultures selection of Sandra Oh as the best actress on television (June 2018),
Matt Zoller Seitz wrote that there was "no precedent" for the "wild extremes" of the show's "comedy and thriller elements". On Metacritic, it has a weighted average score of 86 out of 100 based on 22 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". Chitra Ramaswamy wrote in
The Guardian that the show "uproots the tired old sexist
tropes of spy thrillers then repots them as feminist in-jokes, patriarchal piss-takes, tasteless murders and blooms of
sapphic chemistry". Describing how Villanelle "does what she always does—exploit society's
misogyny by imitating a victim of it"—Emily Nussbaum wrote in
The New Yorker that the potent idea that undergirds the show is that "femininity is
itself a sort of
sociopathy, whose performance, if you truly nail it, might be the source of ultimate power". Angelica Jade Bastién wrote in
Vulture that the second season, with new showrunner Emerald Fennell, "trades in the precise mordant wit of series creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge for something more garish and horrifying", further describing the "wild consumption" of food and clothing "that builds into the closest thing the show has come to a genuine sex scene between" the two women. On Metacritic, it has a weighted average score of 63 out of 100 based on 16 critics, indicating "generally favourable reviews".
Season 4 On Rotten Tomatoes, the fourth season has an approval rating of 53% based on 94 reviews, with an average rating of 6.3/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Villanelle's found religion in
Killing Eves climactic season, but this series has spun its wheels for so long that the thrill is gone." On Metacritic, it has a weighted average score of 55 out of 100 based on 14 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". The series's ending received a backlash from its fanbase and critics, who called it unsatisfying and cruel. The finale was accused of perpetuating the
Bury Your Gays trope; killing a queer main character moments after she achieved happiness, with no real contextual reason for the death. The episode was quickly added to 'worst TV finale' lists. Jennings, in an article for
The Guardian, consoled upset fans, deeming the ending 'a bowing to convention'. Other accusations of homophobia, present throughout the season, included the religious-themed redemption arc for Villanelle, as well as the overall treatment of the relationship between Eve and Villanelle. A series of comments made by Sally Woodward Gentle and showrunner Laura Neal in post-season interviews had referred to the controversial death scene as a sort of "rebirth" for the surviving main character, allowing her to return to a "normal life". Comer and Oh defended the ending with Comer saying the death of Villanelle was "inevitable". Oh said, "Villanelle had to die to bring the show to an end point. Honestly at the beginning of 2020 when discussing the finale it was the other way around, but through the pandemic we changed tracks. Villanelle goes onto more ethereal realms. And Eve is left to survive." Originally Eve was going to die instead of Villanelle. Oh said she had suggested Eve should die and told series writer Laura Neal that the demise of her character "would be the strongest and the most interesting" conclusion. She was eventually told, "We can't do it. We need to change it… Eve needs to live." Comer and Oh did not believe a happy ending was possible for their characters. In 2019 when asked about Eve and Villanelle having a happy ending Oh said, "I think the idea of living happily ever after and running away with each other, I think the happily is the only problem along with living." Prior to filming, and during the
George Floyd protests and the resulting re-examining of race relations worldwide, series four generated an earlier backlash when Kayleigh Llewellyn tweeted a screenshot of a Zoom call with the other writers. This led to criticism of the lack of diversity in the writer's room, given one of the programme's leads, Eve Polastri, is an Asian woman. Woodward Gentle later responded, stating, "You look at that room and it's full of brilliant female writers, we've got a really strong LGBTQ contingent, but it's not good enough and we need to do better."
"Best of" lists Review aggregator
Metacritic reported in early December 2018 that more individual television critics included
Killing Eve in their 2018 year-end Top Ten lists than any other show. In November 2018,
Killing Eve was chosen as
Time magazine's Best Show of 2018, the magazine's Judy Berman writing that "the characters were multidimensional but incomplete, their mutual obsession fueled by the sense that each woman had something crucial the other lacked". It was number three on ''The
New York Post's
Decider.com "Best TV Shows of 2018" list, being praised for "brilliant writing" and "nuanced performances". It was also second on the "25 Best TV Shows of 2018" list from Paste'' magazine, which labelled it as "the best new series of the year". In December 2018,
The Guardian named
Killing Eve the best TV show of 2018, describing it as a "high-wire act of misdirection that subverted stale genre expectations" and saying that it "mix[es] genres – spy thriller, comedy, action film, workplace drama and... farce – without it collapsing into a tonal mess".
The New York Times included
Killing Eve in its "Best TV Shows of 2018" list, stating that the series was "infused ... with the
brio of a dark comedy, though its hour length marked it as crime drama".
The New York Times also included Oh's and Comer's performances in its list of "Best Performances of 2018", noting "these two women are inventive about how to be funny in a thriller" and "make run-of-the mill embarrassment seem more lethal than any bullet".
NPR included the show on its list of "Favorite TV Shows of 2018", saying that it may be "the strangest—and most compelling—story of how opposites attract on TV this year".
The Washington Post listed
Killing Eve as the third best show of 2018, calling the "sleeper hit... splendidly paced".
USA Today listed the show at fifth place on its "Best TV Shows of 2018" list, remarking that it "completely surprises you, from its writing to its performances to its direction to the names on the poster".
New York magazine's pop culture website
Vulture included the series as number seven on Jen Chaney's "10 Best TV Shows of 2018" list, remarking on its immediate and escalating "sense of propulsive daring" and its infusion of "feminine energy".
TV Guide named Oh's and Comer's performances as the second best TV performance of 2018, and said that the show "ended up on pretty much everyone's Best of 2018 lists".
Vanity Fair listed the show at second place on its "Best TV Shows of 2018" list, saying that "watching
Killing Eve is like spraying a disinfectant for the musty tropes of prestige drama directly onto your brain" and inviting viewers to "come for the black comedy; stay for the fashion".
Rolling Stone named the show as the fourth best TV show of 2018, describing it as "exciting and scary while making room for the quippy dialogue and smart observations about how women interact".
IndieWire listed
Killing Eve as the fourth best new TV show of 2018, saying that "exploring identity and dark desires, the series never met an impulse it didn't pursue to its extreme", and that "outrageous and often off-kilter dark humor only highlights the show's transgressive charms". Livingly Media listed the series as the third best TV show of 2018, saying it is "loaded with quippy dialogue and razor-sharp observations about how women interact in increasingly destructive environments".
Mashable rated the show number four on its "Best New TV Shows of 2018" list, praising the two lead actors and commenting that the show was "exactly the weird, psychosexual romp (that) 2018 needed". In September 2019,
The Guardian ranked
Killing Eve 30th on its list of the 100 best TV shows of the 21st century, stating that "few shows in TV history have scythed on to the screen with as much
elan". In December 2019,
The New York Times named the show as 9th on its Best International TV Shows of the Decade, characterising it as "a riff on the romantic spy thriller that can be darkly funny one moment and devastating the next".
Ratings The first series had unbroken weekly ratings growth among adults aged 25–54 and 18–49, which no other television show had accomplished in more than a decade. The second series was simulcast on both AMC and BBC America, with its premiere drawing a combined total of 1.17 million viewers. When the first episode of the second series was shown on BBC One it had 3.5 million viewers taking a 21% audience share. ==Accolades==