Simonpillai mentions that the show "tries to find the tricky balance between that Sherlock skepticism and Doyle's openness to spiritualism" and that "you have to be willing to accept that a visit from a persistent cardinal or flickering lights can be signs from the dead."

She concludes that Surviving Death "tells a compelling tale of people's desire for meaning in the universe — and of their deep, unrelenting love for deceased family and friends.

"[3] Film critic and pop-culture writer Nick Schager wrote for The Daily Beast that Surviving Death's evidence "is of a pseudo-scientific, anecdotal, and/or outright fanciful sort."

He adds that while the show does highlight how people cling to such experiences and beliefs for comfort, the repeated suggestions are that of a universal conclusion that lost loved ones are well ("affirmation-by-numbers").

He describes the show's view of afterlife as simplistic, "one in which all ghosts communicate in the same indirect-clue fashion, and have the same unrevealing things to say ... that our paths are irreversibly set in stone, and thus that we have no free will, and that a higher power with a divine plan governs everything and everyone."

[5] A review in the Explica magazine described Surviving Death as "one of the biggest nonsense of this incipient movie season", "a regrettable attempt to legitimize magical thinking", presenting a collection of pseudoscientific parapsychology as science.

It adds that the show promotes delusions as justifications, ignoring that the absence of evidence should imply caution and scientific skepticism instead of jumping to fantastic conclusions.

It notes that the various testimonies have been selected and presented by the producers to push their own conclusions and that discredited hoaxes like Franek Kluski's "materialisations" using paraffin are claimed to be genuine.