Nocturne Has 85 Percent From Critics. The Praise Goes to Stephen Graham, the Complaints to the Formula.

Nocturne arrived with its résumé printed on the poster. An Emmy winner plays the serial killer. Liev Schreiber plays the detective who caught him, Zazie Beetz plays the FBI agent who goes undercover to get close to him, and Tim Van Patten, a veteran of The Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire, directs the first two hours. Apple TV released those two episodes on Friday, October 30.

Critics mostly like it. Read the reviews, though, and you keep finding the same two sentences in different words: Stephen Graham is terrific, and you have seen this story before. Here is where the reviews agree, where they split, and whether to start it this week or wait for the finale.

The scorecard

• Rotten Tomatoes: 85 percent from 20 reviews as of November 1, with an average of 7 out of 10.
• Metacritic: 72 from 18 critics, which counts as generally favorable. Fourteen of those reviews are positive, four are mixed, and none are negative.
• Audiences: 60 percent on the Rotten Tomatoes Popcornmeter, from fewer than 50 ratings. Too early to mean much yet.
• Early viewing: A day after the premiere, CBR reported that Nocturne was the most-watched show on Apple TV worldwide, per FlixPatrol.
• The catch: Critics were sent seven of the ten episodes, so nobody has reviewed the ending.

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What Nocturne is about

Apple bases the series on The Sandman, a novel in Lars Kepler's Joona Linna series of Swedish crime thrillers. Lars Kepler is the pen name of Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril and Alexander Ahndoril, and Apple says the ten books have sold about 20 million copies. The show moves the story from Stockholm to Western Pennsylvania.

Schreiber plays Jonah Lynn, an ex-soldier turned homicide detective who leaves Philadelphia for a quiet small town. Graham plays Jurek Walter, the killer he put away, now locked up at a psychiatric hospital. When one of Jurek's victims turns up alive, Jonah races to find the one person still missing, while his protégé, FBI agent Saga Bauer (Beetz), goes undercover inside the hospital to get answers from Jurek himself.

If a young FBI agent pumping a caged killer for clues sounds like The Silence of the Lambs, the critics noticed too. Rowan Joffé created the series and co-runs it with John Hlavin. It is rated TV-MA, and episodes run roughly 52 to 62 minutes. It was first developed under the title Lazarus, with Tom Hardy once attached to play Jurek.

The one thing critics agree on: Stephen Graham

Graham won the Emmy for lead actor in a limited series in September 2025 for Netflix's Adolescence, playing a father trying to understand what his 13-year-old son has done, and shared the writing Emmy with Jack Thorne. Here he plays the man everyone else is trying to understand, and that is the part of Nocturne the reviews praise most.

Stephen Graham oozes such calm, intense menace in Nocturne that the air practically vibrates.Nick Schager, The Daily Beast

Schager calls it "a terrific performance of controlled, cagey chaos." The A.V. Club's Saloni Gajjar, who gave the show a B+, writes that "it's Graham's performance that truly dials up Nocturne's creepy factor" and compares his smile to Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs. CBR's Katie Doll, at 8 out of 10, calls him "the standout of this crime thriller series."

Even the cooler reviews lead with him. CBC's headline reads "Stephen Graham can't elevate Apple TV's Nocturne beyond by-the-numbers Nordic bleakness." The Hollywood Reporter's Angie Han finds him "reasonably unsettling," a mix of "hulking physicality and soft-spoken calculation."

The complaint: you have seen this before

The Hollywood Reporter put the case against it in a headline: "Liev Schreiber and Stephen Graham Get Handcuffed by Clichés in Apple's Dully Competent Serial Killer Thriller." Han writes that the hero cop "is a composite of genre clichés," a detective saddled with a dead child, a dead wife and a dead partner, and sums the show up as "generally watchable, if never totally gripping."

Collider's Charlie Ridgely, at 7 out of 10, writes that "it's difficult not to compare Apple TV's new crime drama to True Detective," and it does not come out ahead: he says much of the series "feels wildly over-produced." CBR flags the setting, noting that "the accents are all over the place" and that "Appalachian staples are simply nonexistent."

It takes a few episodes

The most useful note for anyone deciding tonight is about pacing. Ridgely warns that "it takes a while for the story to really get going," then adds that "by the halfway point, things really start to fire on all cylinders." Gajjar's one real reservation is the destination, not the ride: "A solution to the case feels preordained."

The surprise: the rest of the cast

Graham gets the headlines, but several critics hand the best-in-show prize to someone else. Han calls Beetz's Saga "easily the most compelling element of Nocturne," and Gajjar writes that "Beetz deftly juggles two distinct characters with ease," Saga and the undercover identity she builds inside the hospital. Ridgely picks Bill Camp, as police chief Dave Ellison, who "shines the brightest here."

Schreiber, by consensus, is exactly what you expect. Han calls him "reliable if unsurprising," and Ridgely calls him "a solid, dependable lead." Rory Culkin plays Karl Anders, a hospital nurse who becomes, in Gajjar's words, "an unwitting pawn between Jurek and the detectives."

Nocturne release schedule on Apple TV

Nocturne streams only on Apple TV, with a new episode every Friday through Christmas Day.

• Episodes 1 and 2: Friday, October 30 (out now)
• Episode 3: November 6
• Episode 4: November 13
• Episode 5: November 20
• Episode 6: November 27
• Episode 7: December 4
• Episode 8: December 11
• Episode 9: December 18
• Episode 10 (finale): December 25

Should you start Nocturne?

We first flagged it in our Halloween weekend watch guide, before reviews posted. Now test it yourself. Add Nocturne to Shortlist and rank it head to head against the crime shows you already love, two at a time, until you know whether it beats True Detective. Our TV show tier list guide shows how to sort the whole list, and the favorite TV shows list maker turns it into something you can share.

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