The 1970s and \u201980s Soviet spy thriller is a genre unto itself at this point, and Peacock\u2019s latest entry Ponies, thankfully, does just enough to shake up the formula to concoct something fresh. Created by David Iserson (Mr. Robot) and Susanna Fogel (The Flight Attendant), the 1977-set series follows a pair of American Embassy secretaries working in Moscow who are thrust into a twisty, dangerous cat-and-mouse game between U.S. and Russian intelligence after their husbands are killed during a clandestine mission.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Game Of Thrones\u2018 Emilia Clarke returns to television as the lead here, taking on the role of the overqualified Bea. While the actor understandably gets top billing, co-star Haley Lu Richardson (The White Lotus) steals the show as fellow secretary-turned-unlikely spy Twila. Clarke\u2019s Bea is the more straightlaced entry-point for viewers into this fish-out of-water spy tale, while Richardson\u2019s Twila is a quirky, fearless, and often very funny foil as the pair search for answers and try to survive long enough to find them.<\/p>\n
Yes, it\u2019s a spy thriller, but at its heart this is a tale of love and friendship between two young women who find hope in each other during a quest to learn the truth about what happened to their husbands. And luckily, Clarke and Richardson are more than capable of carrying and balancing all that weight and emotion without letting things feel too trite or forced. Across these eight episodes, you see their relationship grow as they realize they\u2019re the only two people going through this particular experience. What\u2019s more, their yin-and-yang personalities, when combined, make for a pretty decent spy. (The show\u2019s title refers to \u201cPersons Of No Interest,\u201d since, as far as the Russians know, these two are just anonymous widows still toiling away as low-level employees at the Embassy.)\u00a0<\/p>\n
Despite the on-paper similarities, this isn\u2019t a story as dark as something like FX\u2019s spy thriller The Americans. It\u2019s more of a sweet-spot mix between that phenomenal series and USA\u2019s mid-aughts hit Burn Notice. Yes, Ponies can absolutely get serious when it needs to, but this also is a stylized show with twists, turns, whodunnits, and laughs.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The attention to period details helps the series sing, with clothes, cars, analog technology, and needle drops that make you feel like you\u2019ve been dropped right into a lived-in 1970s spy thriller. To take things a step further, the show was shot in the 3:2 aspect ratio, giving it the quality of a decades-old photograph. (This aesthetic choice admittedly takes a bit of getting used to.)\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Russian setting and well-executed production design (the show was actually filmed in Budapest) makes for a potent backdrop, and you can almost feel the paranoia and surveillance around every cobblestone street corner and under every shag-carpet rug. The place also deepens the sense of isolation and claustrophobia for Bea and Twila as they\u2019re not only underestimated by basically everyone around them but also quite\u00a0 isolated, negatives that they use to their advantage. (As the latter puts it, \u201cWe\u2019re women. People only look at us if they wanna have sex with us or marry us. And that\u2019s it. No one would ever suspect us of anything.\u201d) Bea at least speaks fluent Russian, while Twila is forced to get by on her attitude and quick thinking, which can mean anything from flirting to get what she wants to lighting a fire to get out of a jam.<\/p>\n
Ponies\u2019 supporting cast fills out very well, with Clarke and Richardson flanked by the likes of a Artjom Gilz as ambitious KGB agent, Petro Ninovskyi as an asset, and Adrian Lester and Nicholas Podany as CIA higher-ups trying to keep the central pair\u2019s operation from going completely off the rails. But our leads remain the show\u2019s focus and biggest selling point\u2014and their chemistry helps make this spy thriller a cut above Peacock\u2019s recent stabs at the genre<\/a>.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n Trent Moore is a contributor to The A.V. Club. Ponies premieres January 15 on Peacock.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The 1970s and \u201980s Soviet spy thriller is a genre unto itself at this point, and Peacock\u2019s latest…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":238248,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[146,85,46,411],"class_list":{"0":"post-238247","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-il","10":"tag-israel","11":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=238247"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238247\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/238248"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=238247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=238247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=238247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}