Pacific on Ratings Crest but Divides Kiwi Critics

If you missed Monday’s premiere of The Pacific, you can catch it again at 10.20pm on Sunday.

As it did with Band of Brothers, TV One is screening same-week repeats of the World War II drama in HD.

Having paid a premium price for the HBO miniseries, the network would have been buoyed by the premiere’s ratings — they weren’t strong enough to win the slot but were competitive with the HD competition: TV2’s Desperate Housewives and TV3’s CSI.

Reviewers on the NZ Herald and The Dominion Post gave it the thumbs-up: the former, a Pacific War vet, said The Pacific showed promise and praised its “gritty reality”; the latter’s Jane Clifton dubbed it “compulsively good”.

But National Radio’s Simon Wilson thought it “bit of a dull drama … What I’m disappointed about is the storytelling is so incredibly simple. There’s no discernible subtext at all.”

And a few days after the vet’s review, the Herald’s Greg Dixon stopped short of calling the premiere a damp squib.