Critical reception The Thick of It received critical acclaim during its original run. On
Metacritic, the first series holds a score of 90 out of 100 based on 4 reviews, indicating "[u]niversal acclaim".
Entertainment Weekly gave the series a grade of A−, with reviewer Alynda Wheat calling the "sly
Britcom [...] a
C-SPAN spin-off of [...]
The Office." Margy Rochlin in
The New York Times described it as "urgently authentic. Visually, the series has a
news-as-it-is-happening feel, where actors are often only half in the frame or partly obscured while reciting a line of dialogue. The cameras will skitter restlessly from character to character, sometimes bouncing so crazily that the result looks like a foot chase from
Cops." The DVD of the first two series received a perfect score from the UK's
Empire magazine, with critic William Thomas calling it "the finest shot of pitch-black comic vitriol to be aimed at
Whitehall in many a moon." A DVD of the post-series 2 specials also received a perfect score from Gary Andrews of
Den of Geek, who wrote: "What makes
The Thick of It so watchable is the feeling that what you're watching could well have happened at one point or another behind the scenes at Westminister. Even the minor characters are perfectly drawn and everybody gets at least one good line, with classic quotes popping up in virtually every line of dialogue.
Yes Minister may have set the bar for political sitcoms but
The Thick of It adds gratuitous swearing and a group of utterly unlikeable yet immensely watchable characters." The third series has a
Rotten Tomatoes score of 83% based on 6 reviews, with an average score of 10/10. The day its first episode aired,
Caitlin Moran wrote an article for
The Times calling
The Thick of It the "best show ever made" and a show that "has changed the way we see politics." Verne Gay of
Newsday gave the series a highest possible grade of A+, calling it "[o]ne of the flat-out funniest half-hours of television in the English-speaking world." His review, published in 2012, posited that Ianucci's semi-spin-off of the show—the U.S.-based
Veep—was a "pallid knockoff" compared to
The Thick of It because of Capaldi's role as Malcolm Tucker in the latter, "a human blowtorch who doesn't merely dress down subordinates but rips their clothes off to pour
sulfuric acid—figuratively speaking, though barely—on their still-smoldering skin." In his review of the first episode,
Michael Deacon of
The Daily Telegraph felt that Tucker's character was "overdone", but admitted that this criticism was "silly" and "tantamount to saying the show's too funny." A negative review came from
The Guardian, whose
Michael White felt that the show "lacked heart, lacked sympathy, lacked good guys, let alone honest ambitions. In that sense it's the exact opposite of another highly professional show about politics,
The West Wing. [...] But I can't stand
The West Wing either: too sentimental, just as
The Thick of It is much too cynical. I can see that it's funny, but I rarely laugh." The fourth and final series has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 88% based on 16 reviews, with an average score of 7.30/10. It is also the only series to have a critical consensus on the site, which reads: "Armando Ianucci's gloriously profane satire concludes at the peak of its dyspeptic hilarity, combining its withering eye for political machinations and its
Shakespearean flow of curse words to deliver a harrowingly funny sendoff." Anthony Paletta of
New York magazine also wrote positively of the show's characterizations, noting their "genuine consciences" at various points. He also praised the show for its "startlingly versatile obscenity." Sam Wollaston of
The Guardian was more critical, writing: "There is an unsubtlety, a too-obviousness, about it that makes me wonder whether Armando Iannucci, what with all his other projects like
[sic] taking over America and the world, had let his eye off this one."
Awards The series has been the recipient of a number of awards, particularly from the
BAFTA. Series 1 won both Best Situation Comedy and Chris Langham won Best Comedy Performance at the
2006 BAFTA Television Awards, with Peter Capaldi being nominated for the same award in 2006 and 2008. Capaldi won the BAFTA for
Best Male Comedy Performance at the
2010 awards, with Rebecca Front winning
Best Female Comedy Performance. The series was also declared the Best Situation Comedy. Additionally, the series won Best Situation Comedy from the
Royal Television Society in 2006 and 2010, and won
Broadcasting Press Guild Awards in 2006 and 2010 for Best Sitcom and Best Writing Team.
Empire included it at No. 81 on their list of "The 100 Best TV Shows Of All Time", calling it "one of the sharpest, fastest-witted comedies ever, skewering Britain's political class via a tornado of creative cursing."
Digital Spy readers voted it the 66th-greatest show of the 21st century. The following year,
BBC Culture polled 206 critics, journalists, academics and industry figures from around the world to compile the
100 greatest television series of the 21st century;
The Thick of It came in at No. 20. The website also selected it as one of 25 shows that defined the century, with Turkish film critic Ali Arikan writing:The early part of the new century was marked by a heinous trend of "new optimism" in U.S. comedy, where spiritual redemption was available to even the least deserving. On the opposite end of the spectrum was
The Thick of It, Armando Iannucci's caustic UK satire, the central premise of which was that everyone involved in government were contemptible halfwits interested purely in self-preservation. Showcasing ever more inventive ways in which powerless politicians and useless civil servants can create monumental crises out of molehills, the show made a star of Peter Capaldi (years after he had won an Oscar for a
short film he directed), whose scathing spin doctor Malcolm Tucker frantically rampaged through Westminster like a foul-mouthed Godzilla. Any faith in politics was confidently and certainly rebuked. Many commentators have written about the show's continued relevance in the years following its final series. In 2016,
NME published an article titled "Eight Times
Brexit Made British Politics Look Like The Thick of It". The following year, Ianucci revived Malcolm Tucker for a 4-page Brexit debate against
Alan Partridge (another character he co-created) for
The Big Issue. Gavin Haynes wrote in
Vice in 2019:Time and again,
The Thick of It led and reality fell in behind. Eighteen months after "Do you know what it's like to clean up your own mother's piss?" we had The
Gillian Duffy Incident.
Nick Clegg used to bang on about "alarm clock Britain". Season four's Nicola Murray had her own target market: "the quiet bat-people". Murray's came first. The term "
omnishambles", coined on the show in 2009, leapt from the screen into politics after
George Osborne's flaky 2012 budget. By the following year, Malcolm Tucker's phrase had entered the
OED. Adam Miller, writing for
Herald Scotland, wrote that it "has become a cliche" to compare modern political developments to the show, noting: "rarely has a
Tory story in the last few years not led to
The Thick of It trending on
Twitter."
Collider's Joe Hoeffner wrote in 2022: "Just as any vaguely
dystopian technological development is compared to an episode of
Black Mirror, people can't help but wonder what Malcolm Tucker would have to say whenever someone in Whitehall makes a fool of themselves, which, in recent years, is more or less on a daily basis." == Spin-offs ==