IFC premieres miniseries The Spoils of Babylon on Thursday Jan. 9, 10 p.m. ET. The following are reviews from TV critics around the web, compiled by B&C.
"Feeling a bit like a Saturday Night Live sketch stretched and inflated, Spoils of Babylon is still a pretty entertaining spoof, provided that much of the audience (and perhaps especially, the targeted younger crowd) has any idea what it’s spoofing."
—Brian Lowry, Variety
"The opening sequence, in which adult Devon is shot and then drives to his office to begin telling his tale, as well as second-episode scenes in which he brings home his new wife, who is a mannequin, are absolutely hilarious. But parody works best when its subject is either truly iconic or still relatively fresh in the minds of the audience and, mercifully, the B-list miniseries of yesteryear are neither."
—Mary McNamara, Los Angeles Times
"Like any worthwhile product with psychedelic properties, it takes a while for The Spoils Of Babylon to kick in. That while is approximately 40 minutes: With the exception of some winding tangents, the first installment of Matt Piedmont and Andrew Steele’s miniseries parody is a straight-faced send-up of The Thorn Birds and its ilk."
—Erik Adams, A.V. Club
"Ferrell’s introductions are slightly more entertaining than the miniseries itself. He’s a master at parodying once important figures who have fallen into cultural obscurity, such as his Saturday Night Live take on Robert Goulet. His inspiration here is a drunken Orson Welles, who made commercials for Paul Masson wines in the late 1970s."
—Christopher Muther, Boston Globe
"The concept's the thing here, made clear by the Spoils website and trailers being more amusing than the overarch production they promote. The first two episodes prove as tiresomely pleased-with- themselves as my run-on sentences."
—Diane Werts, Newsday
