“What if a hyper-competent fictional archetype was actually just bad at his job?” is a tried and true setup. It’s usually mined for broad comedy: think Rowan Atkinson’s awful James Bond parody Johnny English. It’s an easy path into parody, and the bathos and acting gags come naturally when your super spy or your vampire hunter or your detective is actually just an idiot.
Slow Horses, a new British spy drama streaming on Apple TV Plus, puts a different spin on things. These spies aren’t necessarily idiots. But they are bastards. Maybe they drink too much, maybe they don’t have the nerve, maybe they made an unforgivable mistake. Maybe they’re just mediocre. You’re not bad enough to be fired, but not good enough to do anything important.
Instead of using this situation for workplace comedy, Slow Horses hustles its unlikely heroes into a fairly straight-forward spy thriller and challenges them to keep up. Sometimes the results are funny and undermine the panache of the genre. And sometimes they’re pretty spicy.
What are slow horses?
Photo: Apple TV Plus
Slow Horses is a fairly close adaptation of Mick Herron’s 2010 spy novel of the same name, the first in Herron’s ‘Slough House’ series about a crew of underperforming spies in MI5, the domestic arm of Britain’s intelligence services. Herron has written 10 other books in the series. So if the Apple TV Plus decides to head back to the well, it’ll have plenty of material to fall back on. Herron combines robust thriller plots with a sardonic, humorous tone and a John Le Carré-style fascination with the political treachery and practical craft of the secret intelligence world. And Apple’s deep pockets have given the series two big stars: Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott-Thomas.
Who is behind the show?
Slow Horses was written and produced by Will Smith (no, not that one), a former stand-up comedian who worked closely with Armando Ianucci on British political satire The Thick of It and Ianucci’s follow-up version of US politics Veep Has. Apple may be hoping it’s found in Smith its version of Succession inventor Jesse Armstrong: another Ianucci-affiliated British writer with a cynical worldview and a penchant for bitter absurdity. His tone certainly suits Herrons well, and an ability to gore the British political class will go a long way in the world of Slough House. But this isn’t Veep or Succession; It’s a mystery thriller, and a pretty good one at that.
Why is?
Photo: Apple TV Plus
River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) is a promising MI5 recruit whose grandfather (Jonathan Pryce) is a royal spy. But when a training exercise ends in disaster, River is relegated to Slough House, a dingy purgatory for the service’s unwanted strays overseen by slovenly former Jackson Lamb (Oldman).
River’s curiosity is piqued when his deskmate Sid (Olivia Cooke) is sent to steal files from a right-wing journalist. Slough House isn’t usually trusted with running operations, so why now? What is the apparently capable Sid even doing in Slough House? What game are the much smarter ghosts playing in Regent’s Park, the headquarters ruled by Diana Tavener (Scott-Thomas)? Is Lamb really as uninterested as it seems?
The conspiracy deepens and the stakes escalate when a student, the son of Pakistani immigrants, is kidnapped by right-wing terrorists and streamed live with threats of his beheading. River decides to do something, and the other “slow horses” are drawn in – including Lamb, who Tavener darkly warns is “burnt out for a reason” and may not be as incompetent as he seems.
What is Slow Horses really about?
Slow Horses is all about living with the spirit of Le Carré. It’s about finding a way to make the kind of grounded, politically incisive, exquisitely twisted spy thrillers of which Le Carré was the undisputed masterpiece in a modern world. The producers certainly cast Gary Oldman in part to evoke the memory of his performance as George Smiley (scientifically proven to be Britain’s greatest spy) in Le Carré’s 2011 film Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
So it’s about intelligence war rooms dominated by huge multi-screen displays. It’s about secret meetings on empty cricket pitches. It’s about secret service meetings with irritated politicians. It’s about dead drops and fireboxes and encrypted files and phones out of garbage cans and big men with earbuds getting out of black SUVs. It’s about brief but shocking moments of violence. It’s about each character having an uncertain motivation and an even more uncertain destiny.
Photo: Apple TV Plus
As it scrapes beneath the whimsical machinations of the intelligence community, Slow Horses digs into a larger issue: disease and division in the corporate body of modern Britain. Le Carré used MI6’s international espionage to examine Britain’s place in the world and take a sad look at its history. Slow Horses uses MI5’s domestic agenda to look inward, at the fault lines in British society and the ways in which unscrupulous journalists, politicians – and, yes, spies – are exploiting them for their own ends.
Is slow horse good?
Slow Horses is a solid, purposeful spy thriller that hits all the notes you want it to hit. The plot is satisfyingly tight and unpredictable without being unreadably labyrinthine. The pacing is expert and Smith’s scripts balance cutting humor with a real sense of danger and a touch of moral backbone.
Despite the eye-popping cast, this isn’t a particularly ambitious show, and she particularly doesn’t consider it great cinema. British television is full of sleek, well-crafted six-episode thrillers like this one (shows like Line of Duty and Happy Valley) and the only thing that separates Slow Horses from the rest is the size of the stars and a certain visual glamor of Apple’s budget brought. It’s good; This TV pot boiler recipe doesn’t need to be messed up. What it needs are twists that are carefully placed and not overdone, a sense of urgency, a sense of place, and charismatic characters. Slow Horses has all of that, and TV veteran director James Hawes knows exactly how to make the most of it.
While Oldman may have been cast for his buttoned-up smiley face, here he is back in a mode in which he spent much of his early career – swearing obnoxiously in a thick London accent – and he clearly enjoys playing to to type. You can say the same of Scott-Thomas, mischievously clicking through shiny corridors and giving orders to subordinates, looking silky and sophisticated. These aren’t deep characters, but they are fun archetypes.
What gives the show its heart, however, is the motley crew that gathers around it. Figuring out, one by one, what fatal mistake doomed these losers to Slough House, and watching them overcome those mistakes and start a reluctant family is a great formula for uncomfortable comfort television.
When and where to see Slow Horses?
The first two episodes are now available to watch on Apple TV Plus. New episodes of the six-episode series are released every Friday.