It\u2019s the spy-themed show about \u201closers, misfits and boozers\u201d that revels in ineptitude, celebrates shabbiness and lingers on hapless, disillusioned cast-offs. Coincidentally, lots of journalists adore it.<\/p>\n
The irony is that Slow Horses<\/a> triumphs where many other television series now fail, in that it returns before time can wipe its existence clean from your mind and you no longer identify as the person you were when you last saw the thing.<\/p>\n Its first season landed on Apple TV+<\/a> in the spring of 2022. Aided by back-to-back series filming and a snappy, old-fashioned \u201csix and done\u201d episode count, its fifth season began this week, which makes Slow Horses the slickest and most efficient TV drama in Britain<\/a>.<\/p>\n This clockwork approach was once the norm, but today you can be waiting several vibe shifts for a hit show to grace a streamer or broadcaster again, its budget having rocketed in tandem with the height of its child stars in the meantime. Slow Horses, by contrast, is so redolent of classic British television that I almost expect a retro spinning-globe BBC<\/a> ident to pop up before each episode.<\/p>\n According to Jay Hunt, a former BBC and Channel 4 executive who is now creative director for Apple TV+ in Europe, the BBC passed on Slow Horses, which she attributed to its \u201chybrid tone\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople go, is that show a comedy? Is that show a drama? And so in, a weird way, that represents risk,\u201d she said in 2024.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t just love a hybrid tone. When I see the review-speak \u201ctonally all over the place\u201d I usually register that as a positive. Life isn\u2019t monotonal, and I don\u2019t want art to be. The hybrid tone of Slow Horses is not just part of why I think it\u2019s brilliant, it\u2019s exactly why.<\/p>\n The series, adapted from Mick Herron<\/a>\u2019s Slough House novels about failed MI5 agents, is sometimes billed as a spy thriller, and if you watched season three, for instance, with increasing levels of dread, you\u2019ll know that tag isn\u2019t wrong.<\/p>\n But Slow Horses is a comedy at heart. That Will Smith, its showrunner \u2013 sadly obliged by the tight schedule to step back after this season \u2013 started out as a stand-up comedian is just one clue. The basic premise of Slough House, a fringe office for \u201cf**k-ups\u201d, recalls the \u201cidiot surrounded by even bigger idiots\u201d model of the traditional British sitcom. Like all the most enduring comedy characters, the \u201cslow horses\u201d banished there are trapped.<\/p>\n The theme of professional incompetence is itself a meta joke. A string of screen treatments have bashed us over the head with the idea that spies are smooth, superskilled types. If they\u2019re not slaloming across continents defeating global threats before breakfast, like James Bond<\/a>, they exude quiet dignity and integrity, like John le Carr\u00e9<\/a>\u2019s George Smiley.<\/p>\n They\u2019re not supposed to forget to load their guns, clumsily spill cartridges while under attack, be instantly spotted while tailing someone or struggle to get an electric bike to function as their getaway vehicle.<\/p>\n [\u00a0Slow Horses review: Dour, dumpy and depressed, is this the broken Britain of spy dramas?Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n They\u2019re not meant to have holes in their socks or be spluttering, dishevelled, hygiene-challenged misanthropes devoted to chain-smoking, whisky-necking and serial farting, like Slough House\u2019s ringmaster, Jackson Lamb. That Gary Oldman<\/a>, who played Smiley in the 2011 film of Tinker Tailer Soldier Spy (the one he should have won the Oscar for), inhabits Lamb with such obvious delight only underlines the contrast.<\/p>\n Slow Horses is a show of contrasts. In the opening episode of the fifth season, based on Herron\u2019s book London Rules, we see River Cartwright (portrayed with glorious comic timing by Jack Lowden<\/a>) lumber up the grotty office staircase with Tesco bags. His starting point is mundanity, there to throw future dangers into sharp relief.<\/p>\n Slough House, a purgatory of bad moods, grimy windows, empty takeaway containers and chaotic box-file clutter, is counterpointed by MI5\u2019s fictionalised \u201cPark\u201d headquarters, presented as a hermetically sealed, pot-planted palace populated by empty suits \u2013 who, for all their resources and imperiousness, are regularly outfoxed by Lamb.<\/p>\n The London of Slow Horses is a wet patchwork of alleys, drains and shuttered shops where rubbish piles up in disused phone boxes, not all of the coffee is drinkable and shiny financial-district buildings loom with extraordinary audacity over the mid-century flats where people actually live. It\u2019s the hybrid landscape of Brexit Britain writ large on the screen.<\/p>\n