It’s the spy-themed show about “losers, misfits and boozers” that revels in ineptitude, celebrates shabbiness and lingers on hapless, disillusioned cast-offs. Coincidentally, lots of journalists adore it.
The irony is that Slow Horses 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.
Its first season landed on Apple TV+ in the spring of 2022. Aided by back-to-back series filming and a snappy, old-fashioned “six and done” episode count, its fifth season began this week, which makes Slow Horses the slickest and most efficient TV drama in Britain.
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 ident to pop up before each episode.
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 “hybrid tone”.
“People go, is that show a comedy? Is that show a drama? And so in, a weird way, that represents risk,” she said in 2024.
I don’t just love a hybrid tone. When I see the review-speak “tonally all over the place” I usually register that as a positive. Life isn’t monotonal, and I don’t want art to be. The hybrid tone of Slow Horses is not just part of why I think it’s brilliant, it’s exactly why.
The series, adapted from Mick Herron’s 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’ll know that tag isn’t wrong.
But Slow Horses is a comedy at heart. That Will Smith, its showrunner – sadly obliged by the tight schedule to step back after this season – started out as a stand-up comedian is just one clue. The basic premise of Slough House, a fringe office for “f**k-ups”, recalls the “idiot surrounded by even bigger idiots” model of the traditional British sitcom. Like all the most enduring comedy characters, the “slow horses” banished there are trapped.
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’re not slaloming across continents defeating global threats before breakfast, like James Bond, they exude quiet dignity and integrity, like John le Carré’s George Smiley.
They’re 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.
They’re 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’s ringmaster, Jackson Lamb. That Gary Oldman, 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.
Slow Horses is a show of contrasts. In the opening episode of the fifth season, based on Herron’s book London Rules, we see River Cartwright (portrayed with glorious comic timing by Jack Lowden) lumber up the grotty office staircase with Tesco bags. His starting point is mundanity, there to throw future dangers into sharp relief.
Slough House, a purgatory of bad moods, grimy windows, empty takeaway containers and chaotic box-file clutter, is counterpointed by MI5’s fictionalised “Park” headquarters, presented as a hermetically sealed, pot-planted palace populated by empty suits – who, for all their resources and imperiousness, are regularly outfoxed by Lamb.
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’s the hybrid landscape of Brexit Britain writ large on the screen.
Indeed, its intrinsic Britishness makes the BBC’s decision to not pick up Slow Horses seem like a telling moment in the transfer of power away from national broadcasters to deeper-pocketed US-owned streamers. You might even call it a mistake worthy of a slow horse.
But this is a city show that hinges on expensive location work. Once you start to notice the cleverness with which the producers have selected and dressed their spots, it’s hard not to be glad that Slow Horses has Apple money behind it. Even the shadows of London don’t come cheap.
