Following its original 1964 broadcast, reviews were mixed. While some critics thought the program's lecturing style was appropriate to get its message across to a mass TV audience, others found it preachy, long-winded or dull. "Variety" described the program as "generalized to the extreme" and ultimately "a disappointment". The "Los Angeles Times" similarly expressed "disappointment" with the "windy, tedious play", complaining that it was "more tract than drama" and saying the opening scene between Grudge and Fred "sounded like the North Hollywood High School debating society and must have cost the play many a bored viewer who turned it off." Jack Gould in "The New York Times" went even further, calling "Carol" "a pretentious and wearing exercise in garrulous ineptitude, one of the more dismaying TV disappointments in several seasons." After receiving letters from viewers disagreeing with his review, Gould wrote a second opinion piece calling the film "condescending, pretentious and dull", "platitudinous propaganda", and "an exercise in heavy-handed sermonizing that the U.N. is good for you." "The Washington Post" printed a generally positive review, but wrote that the film "failed" because "o most of the audience...the lesson that was being stressed has already been learned." Despite expressing dissatisfaction with the overall program, critics still praised the performances of some of the actors, particularly Sellers, Lawrence and Hingle.