‘Snowpiercer’ Critics Review: The TV Show Never Quite Wins

The TNT show, streaming on Netflix, is a spin-off from Bong Joon Ho’s 2013 film.

Snowpiercer, developed by Josh Friedman and Graeme Manson, is based on the original series of graphic novels by Jacque Lob, Jean-Marc Rochette and Benjamin Legrand, and Bong Joon-ho’s 2013 film. Season One premiered on TNT on 17 May and is streaming on Netflix from 25 May.

Here’s what critics have to say:

“Snowpiercer the series manages, gloriously, to bypass all that is great and almost all that is good about both of its sources of material, and turn it instead into a police procedural that just happens to be set on the aforementioned giant armoured train. Think of it as steampunk Law & Order. CSI: Wastelands. NYPD Brrr, It’s Cold. Send me a postcard if you want more of these. I’m self-isolating again. I got time”.

Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“This TV series is an unusual one – and not because of that bizarre set-up. To enjoy it, it’s better to have not watched the film. Entirely within its own context and with all hopes of plausibility cast to the wind, the series is a stylish and refreshing take on a detective drama”.

Catherine Gee, The Telegraph

“Snowpiercer has a curiosity about its characters that exceeds its grasp. It places them in arrangements and situations that are genuinely wild, and then elicits bland or unremarkable emotional reactions. A case in point is the way each episode begins: A character from some different corner of the train delivers a monologue. It’s a way to show off how overgrown and rife with potential is the show’s universe, and one that, landing as it often does in fairly simple motivations expressed in plain, functional language, tends to fall flat”. 

Daniel D’ Addario, Variety

“Snowpiercer as a treatise on leadership and representative government, with fight scenes and a lot of near nudity, is something that fits both basic-cable norms and the blue-state side of the current national mood. It’s a struggle, though, to reconcile those ideas with the fundamental appeal of the book and film — continuous bloody combat and kicky dystopian ambience — and it’s a struggle the show never quite wins. The action is routine, the drama tends toward the banal and sentimental, and the social symbolism of class division and technocracy, while cleverly worked out, isn’t compelling or coherent enough to tie it all together”.

Mike Hale, The New York Times