| 100 |
New York Daily News David Hinckley
In theme and execution, in caliber of performance and level of dramatic tension, "Sleeper Cell" is an impressive, relentlessly gripping drama. |
| 80 |
Newsday Diane Werts
A rich character drama and riveting suspenser that makes Fox's "24" seem lackluster. |
| 80 |
Orlando Sentinel Hal Boedeker
Sleeper Cell moves with more sophistication than most crime dramas. |
| 80 |
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Rob Owen
Smart, thrilling and politically timely, "Sleeper Cell" works overtime to mix believable character drama with jolts of surprising plot twists. |
| 80 |
TV Guide Matt Roush
This engrossing and unnerving nail-biter is a rare treat: a thriller with a brain and a soul. |
| 80 |
Hollywood Reporter Barry Garron
This is a first-rate series that explores the hearts and minds of terrorists even as it presents scene after scene of suspense and action. |
| 80 |
LA Weekly Robert Abele
At times it plays like a hybrid of the ticking-bomb thrills from ["24"] and the moral thorniness that undergirds HBO’s excellent crime series The Wire. |
| 80 |
Boston Globe Matthew Gilbert
An eerie -- and excellent -- new series that makes ''24" look more than ever like a broadly drawn comic strip. |
| 75 |
Detroit Free Press Mike Duffy
"Sleeper Cell" works as a smart, sharply styled thriller about a very serious subject. |
| 75 |
People Weekly Tom Gliatto
The second half builds steadily and surely toward a potential meet-and-greet with the apocalypse. [12 Dec 2005, p.39] |
| 70 |
Time James Poniewozik
Imperfect but chilling.... In the end, Sleeper Cell is every bit as nailbiting as 24, with one crucial difference: neither the terrorists nor the Feds are supergeniuses. |
| 70 |
PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs
Sleeper Cell is compelling television primarily for its excellent performances and chilling premises, rather than its plots. Alarming as these may be, they are rendered here with predictable rising and falling action, a bit of romance, and some tidily resolved conflicts. |
| 70 |
Wall Street Journal Dorothy Rabinowitz
Highly compelling most of the time. |
| 70 |
San Jose Mercury News Charlie McCollum
While it is more intriguing than gripping, the drama has considerable power in its best moments, many of which will come in the last episodes. |
| 70 |
The New York Times Alessandra Stanley
"Sleeper Cell" is better than "24." |
| 60 |
Philadelphia Inquirer Ellen Gray
Most of the time, it's... pretty gripping. |
| 60 |
The New Yorker Nancy Franklin
Despite the mostly awful dialogue, “Sleeper Cell” succeeds on the strength of its plot. |
| 60 |
Baltimore Sun David Zurawik
If one is looking for a TV drama that earnestly tries to reflect and speak to our lives and times, it would be hard to do better than Sleeper Cell. |
| 58 |
Entertainment Weekly Gillian Flynn
All of Sleeper Cell's didacticism would be forgiven if it were more entertaining. [2 Dec 2005, p.67] |
| 50 |
Variety Brian Lowry
Despite laudable elements -- particularly the magnetic Oded Fehr as the cell leader -- [the] series is too uneven to dub this ambitious mission a complete success. |
| 50 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer Melanie McFarland
Fehr's performance is worth noting, if only because his cool demeanor is frighteningly at odds with the insane rhetoric pouring out of his mouth. His portrayal may be the show's greatest point of interest -- that is, if you aren't annoyed by Shields, or hypnotized into a slumber by Ealy's never-ending "haunted past" routine. |
| 40 |
Village Voice Joy Press
Sleeper Cell moves way too slowly to get anyone's pulse racing—except maybe the Arab American community, which will almost certainly protest, despite the writers' awkward attempts to give equal screen time to "good" and "bad" Muslims. |
| 40 |
New York Magazine John Leonard
Sleeper Cell tries laudably to entertain us and to complicate us simultaneously. But we also experience the Stockholm syndrome in reverse. The more time we spend with these people, the less we care about them. |
| 40 |
Los Angeles Times Paul Brownfield
For all its putative complexity, then, its passing examination of radical Islam versus peaceable Islam, its allusions to Guantanamo Bay and the Iraq insurgency, "Sleeper Cell" feels more like "The Shield," the L.A.-based cop drama on FX, the characters talking in overly stylized, expository quips, the L.A. cityscape whipping past in convincing fashion. |
| 38 |
USA Today Robert Bianco
Cobbled together out of hundreds of undercover/caper movie clichés, Sleeper Cell is so absurdly detached from the real world, it makes 24 look like a documentary. |
| 30 |
Kansas City Star Aaron Barnhart
The one thing “Sleeper Cell” does commendably is to suggest that there is a struggle going on for the soul of Islam, and that al-Qaida does not have the only say in the matter. But that message is swamped by predictable thriller filler and cheap production values. |
