“Slow Horses” Is the Spy Drama With Everything—Except Popularity
As a result of all of this, Apple recently announced it would be scaling back TV production. This is a shame. If good television is going to survive and evolve in the increasingly vast wasteland of the streaming era, it’s going to need extravagant patrons like Apple. And while Apple might understand itself as the next HBO, its real strength lies, ironically, in its more humble series. Hijack, Silo, Criminal Record, Presumed Innocent—Apple has, arguably, the greatest middlebrow roster available on streaming right now. If any of its detective shows or legal thrillers were streaming on Netflix, they’d be everybody’s water-cooler obsession. But due to the streamer’s marketing foibles, they remain crowd-pleasers playing to vanishingly small crowds. Perhaps no series embodies this predicament more than Slow Horses, your favorite show that you might not yet know exists.
The best way to describe Slow Horses—whose fourth season debuts this fall—is that it’s an underdog spy thriller. One of the enduring images of Tomas Alfredson’s great 2011 feature film adaptation of John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is the shot of the heads of British intelligence convening around a conference table in what looks like a freestanding trailer or structure deep inside their larger headquarters. Almost vaultlike, the nerve center of their operations is rooted in the innermost core of the vast agency. Like Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor, Slow Horses is also a knotty drama about British intelligence starring Gary Oldman, but, unlike le Carré’s tale, Slow Horses is about agents both physically and institutionally on the outs.
Based on British mystery novelist Mick Herron’s popular series, and developed by English comedian and writer Will Smith, the show focuses on a group of misfit agents, who, exiled from The Park (the show’s fictionalized MI5 headquarters), have been filed quietly away at a run-down off-site campus called Slough House. Their leader is Jackson Lamb (Oldman), a viscerally disgusting career spook and veteran of the Cold War who’s been handed the reins at Slough House as punishment for years of impolitic shenanigans within the agency. His office is the home to a shambling squad of agents, all pushed out of active service but not sacked. Slough House is a purgatory for addicts, assholes, and fuckups. Part of the premise of the show, however, is that few of these agents are, in fact, bad at their jobs. They’ve arrived at Slough House because of personality defects rather than professional incompetence; some of them are there simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. When a particularly unpromising or embarrassing case comes up, it gets tossed over to Slough House—where the slow horses get the job done, even if things get a little sloppy.
