The AV Club: 91/100
Then again, with Bloodline, there’s no telling what’s in store for Kevin (Norbert Leo Butz). By juxtaposing foundational scenes from the past and fleeting fragments of the future, the show reassures the audience of how much groundwork the writers have laid. Bloodline occasionally comes across as a potboiler, but it always feels like someone’s got eyes on the stovetop. The storytelling approach inspires the audience’s trust and earns its patience, which feels comforting even though patience is optional with Netflix’s full-season premieres.

The main concern with Bloodline echoes the issue with Damages. As effective as the fractured narrative is in a debut season, it can become constricting in subsequent seasons. That’s of acute concern for Bloodline given the stakes involved in the “bad thing” in question, which are so high they seem impossible to match, much less surpass. But to focus on season two is to dilute the beauty of the Netflix model. Mainlining is for today. Worrying about the future is for tomorrow.

Entertainment Weekly: 83/100
Netflix is famous for its cliff-hangers, thanks to twisty dramas like House of Cards and their bingeable on-demand formats. What makes Bloodline different is that by the time the pilot’s over, you already know what’s going to happen, which only sharpens the tension. That creeping sense of dread John feels? It sums up the experience of watching this gripping thriller.

Bloodline isn’t the only recent drama to explore the dark side of family loyalty—co-creator Todd A. Kessler mined that theme brilliantly as a writer for The Sopranos—but it wrenches real suspense from showing how those loyalties shift.

Alan Sepinwall at Hitflix: 67/100:
The flashforwards and narration, designed to pull viewers through the quiet expository passages at the start, had the opposite effect on me. They reminded me of how much pleasure "Damages" took in pulling the rug out from under the audience whenever possible, and how the constant surprises and reversals quickly grew tired (when everything is shocking, nothing is), while turning the core characters into puppets who danced at the whims of the story, rather than people with understandable and consistent motivation.

We'll see if they play those games to this extent with "Bloodline" — Todd Kessler has suggested to at least one reporter that the flash-forwards won't be a series-long (or even season-long) device — but for now, the new show seems more style over substance, parking a lot of actors I like in an attractive location and not giving most of them material that's up to their talents.