Fay Ripley

This week, Reggie (Martin Clunes) is having trouble with small talk. Of course, Reggie is struggling with bigger and worse things, but it's the small talk where it breaks out. Whether chatting by the water-cooler or having a glass of wine with his mother, he can't hit the right note, and those vivid fantasy moments he has don't help. He also continues to pine for Jasmine (Lucy Liemann), the gorgeous woman at work. Liemann has practically nothing to do, but does it well. Likewise, Fay Ripley seems wasted as Reggie's wife and tonight Geoffrey Whitehead and Wendy Craig add to the roster of comic talent worthy of more and better material. Better is the occupational health "wellness woman" whose response to any ailment is a perky "Oh that's horrid! Oh you sad sausage!" But it's a brave move for the script to mock poor-quality TV - luckily it's in one of the better lines, as Reggie notes, "Quite tiring the telly, isn't it? At one point I seemed to be watching CSI: Bournemouth."

David Butcher, Radio Times, 1st May 2009

Martin Clunes is a first-rate comedy actor, but also a very courageous one if he's willing to tackle a character created by comic genius Leonard Rossiter. Yet although Clunes lacks Rossiter's manic edge, nobody does grumpy curmudgeon better and there are other differences in the series that augur well, not least that Perrin creator David Nobbs has co-written this series with Men Behaving Badly creator Simon Nye, who understands Clunes' talent well.

Characters like Wendy Craig's Marion, Reggie's disapproving mum, are refreshingly new and there's promise in the casting of Fay Ripley as Perrin's wife and Geoffrey Whitehead as her father.

Mike Ward, The Daily Express, 24th April 2009

Mutual Friends started with a suicide but ended with a fire engine. Carl's suicide was the writers' device with which to bring together his surviving friends, Martin, played by Marc Warren, and Patrick (Alexander Armstrong). Martin was the worrying type and he had loads to worry about: not only was he about to lose his job as a solicitor but his wife, Jen (Keeley Hawes), announced that she had slept with Carl and that their marriage was in trouble (all Martin's fault).

Patrick also had his problems: a personal financial crisis had got his E-Type Jag repossessed and one of his business partners was edging him out of his own Boden-style catalogue company while edging himself into his former girlfriend's knickers. The worrying thing about Patrick, buoyed along by ego and testosterone, was his inability to worry. Yet this follicly challenged Lothario was not, it transpired, irredeemably self-centred. It was he, after all, who was responsible for the fire engine's comical appearance - called not to hose a conflagration but to fulfil Martin's disgruntled young son's ambition to ride on one.

Warren, Armstrong and Hawes are watchable actors but you couldn't help but wish their parts had been occupied by Jimmy Nesbitt, Robert Bathurst and Helen Baxendale and that, as in Cold Feet, there had been room for a genuinely funny subplot (as regularly supplied by the actors Fay Ripley and John Thomson). Nor could you fail to spot how inspiration was running out even as early as episode one. Martin, for instance, kept being overheard saying things that he shouldn't by the people he was badmouthing. Only once could you accuse the programme of inventiveness and that was in the character of Carl's widow Leigh, played with cheerful understatement by Claire Rushbrook, who had clearly lost her how-to-grieve manual and went round saying how 'cross' she was with him.

My hunch is that Mutual Friends will keep its audience, not least because it is unusual in putting at its centre male rather than female friendships. But how, even as I watched its titles (as ripped off from Mad Men), I wished for more subtlety, more black humour, more depth of emotion!

Andrew Billen, The Times, 27th August 2008