Gripping series- female characters are diverse in personalities and their non judgemental interactions are refreshing to see . I do have a problem with the accents and can only get about 25 % of what is said , as they do have heavy accents . I realize this is a British production, I just wish I cold understand more. I gave this a 9 only because I miss so much of the dialogue.

Although much of the visual period detail is authentic, the background has been very poorly researched and the viewer is treated as a simpleton.Specifically: it is implied that a 17-year-old would be liable to be hanged-in 1953??!!!! Also, there is reference to trial of a civilian by a secret military court. Civilians would only have been tried by military court had martial law been declared. What I presume the writer meant was trial in camera: a very different procedure, the verdict of which would have been public. There are other similar flaws.Also, the protagonists often reach conclusions without it being clear to the viewer how they have done so, and there are gaps in the logic of the plot.Another sorry example of how mainstream British drama has been dumbed down.

This was a sparkling, well thought out, murder mystery. It dealt with the part of World War II that we seldom get to see on the screen. These four women had developed their minds to nearly super-human levels, only to let them rust in the decades following the war. This drama is set in that curious after-time. It's a time when hands that had once killed and maimed had to be placed in a domestic setting. Both the protagonists and villain were all products of that curious time. They captured the sense of mid- 50's London exquisitely. The piece was well cast, well filmed and well acted. I hope that we get to see more of the amazing women of Beltchley!

The genre of the amateur detective is old and shopworn. In the hands of the masters like Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers it can be brilliant, as long as we accept the formal quaint convention that a little old lady or an English lord might go around solving murders that baffle the police. In Bletchley Circle instead of one amateur sleuth we get four: a committee of nerdy women who, having worked at code-breaking in WWII, now have not much to do and nothing to challenge their superior minds. In fact, almost the entire first episode is spent having one of the ladies trying to convince the other three to join the hunt for a vicious serial killer. But even the four together don't add up to one Miss Marple or Peter Whimsey. They're supposed to be super smart and great at putting together clues from reading newspapers and other evidence they collect, but at the same time they're clueless, bumbling and squeamish. One nearly gets herself raped trying to bait the killer and they commit various obvious offenses by contaminating crime scenes and stealing evidence. No wonder the police regard them with suspicion. Though they uncover leads through careful analysis, how they arrive at their conclusions is summarized so quickly and sketchily that the audience has no idea how the pieces were put together. In detective fiction the reader (or viewer) is supposed to have some idea of the steps that lead to the solution of the case. In this we are just told the women are doing some heavy thinking and then come out with a result.Another very annoying feature is the heavy feminist bias that muddies the plot. Not counting the killer, most all the men in this series are either fools or abusers. This is retro feminism from the 1980s superimposed on a postwar story. One girl's husband notices that she's absent from the home at odd hours and improbably accepts her strange behavior without explanation. Another woman's husband beats her up, a digression which adds to the theme that men are beasts and annoyingly delays the unfolding of the plot. Grotesque and creepy details of the killer's M.O. seemed purely gratuitous to me detracting from the excitement of the hunt. The mystery-thriller is an old standby and needs new elements to keep it fresh, but remember that gifted amateurs going around solving crimes is a literary convention that requires a willing suspension of disbelief.