"Mind you, that's based on two episodes only — BBC America has proved that once it gets a big zeitgeist-y hit it can be as stingy with the episodes as anyone else," says Tim Goodman. "But all that Killing Eve really needed to prove it does rather concretely and emphatically in the two episodes sent for review. That is, it still goes down like a particularly glug-glug-glug-able cocktail, as effervescent and fun and thrilling and smart and witty as ever — which is the heaviest half of the equation. Also: It's still as believable and twisty, an emotional entanglement of motives and obsessions and tactical fun that a psychopathic assassin can have with the in-over-her-head agent on her tail." Goodman adds that "the one glorious exclamation point of these first two episodes is that Jodie Comer proves that everybody who left her off any awards ballots (and that would be pretty much every organization) got it very wrong. If you didn't know she's as essential to the heartbeat of Killing Eve as Sandra Oh, well, you should have, because it was pretty obvious — but nonetheless these first two episodes drive that home decisively."
Jodie Comer deserves more acclaim: "What lingers most about Comer’s performance is her ability to give layers to Villanelle’s petulance," says Inkoo Kang. "Her grins betray pride in her work and in her own fiendishness, blending her callous coltishness with a midcareer self-assurance. Comer somehow makes her character’s refusal to think about the ramifications of her actions compelling, the blanks in her thought process as willful as the hard-won erasure of her humble origins."
Why AMC Networks is betting so heavily on Killing Eve: "It is incredibly rare, and probably only getting rarer, for shows to break through in the kinds of ways that Killing Eve has," says AMC Networks boss Sarah Barnett. "Killing Eve was a perfect storm of various things coming together. First and foremost, the show was so bloody good. And then, people love to recommend it. When you have that, along with the ability for social media to amplify and blow something up in the way that only it can, then you can have this very rare streak of (ratings) growing through a season."