Frauds: ‘fantastically stylish’ heist caper is ‘damn good fun’

A con artist released from prison on compassionate grounds is reunited with her old partner in crime and begins planning one last epic heist. “How do you make this very familiar set-up feel fresh?” said Anita Singh in The Telegraph. By casting Suranne Jones and Jodie Whittaker as the leads and turning the drama into “rollicking good fun”.

Set in “dusty southern Spain”, the action kicks off as Bert (Jones) is released early from a 10-year prison sentence after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. Her old friend Sam (Whittaker) is ready to look after her in her final months, and takes Bert back to her rural home where she has been “keeping a respectably low profile with only a donkey and some chickens for company”.

But it’s not long before Bert is “back to her old tricks” and by the end of the first episode she has unveiled her “grand plan: an audacious art heist”. There’s more to the series, though, than finding out whether the pair can “pull it off”. Their friendship has a long and rocky history which is anything but straightforward. “Are they being completely truthful with one another”?

Shot against the “sweeping” backdrop of Tenerife, the show looks “gorgeous”, said Vicky Jessop in London’s The Standard. It’s also “damn good fun”. Jones and Whittaker are “excellent”: the pair have fizzing chemistry and engage in some “side-splittingly funny set pieces”.

There’s no denying the actors’ talent, but “even they couldn’t make a silk purse from the sow’s ear that was some of the dialogue”, said Carol Midgley in The Times. “My buttocks frequently clenched” during lines that “felt like ChatGPT had been working overtime”. But things “improved considerably” by the second episode, “especially when they enlist the magician and illusionist Jackie Diamond (Elizabeth Berrington)” to help with the elaborate heist.

The “bad news” is there are some “implausible” plot points, said Charlotte O’Sullivan in The Independent. Still, “the blissful moments outweigh the blah ones”. The feminism is “down to earth and visceral”; hats off to Jones and Whittaker for making the series which, although “not perfect, celebrates sly broads who fly under the radar and proves (for those of us who’d kill to see Jones conquer Hollywood) that you don’t always need a big screen to think big”.

Plot twists are carefully layered “between deepening revelations about Bert and Sam’s history”, and a “mesmerisingly intricate portrait of a friendship” emerges, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. In all, it’s a “fantastically stylish, emotionally rich and profoundly intelligent piece of entertainment that is feminist to its bones without preaching and in every way a triumph. More again, soon, please.”