It’s not hard to see why the British television series Slow Horses, whose third season is now streaming on Apple TV+, is slowly becoming a word-of-mouth hit. There is a John le Carré novel titled A Perfect Spy. Slow Horses might be called Imperfect Spies.
Based on novels by Mick Herron, the show follows employees of the British counterintelligence service, MI5, who are suffering internal exile at a shabby off-site branch called Slough House. (Slough House is, as far as I know, fictional.) These officers have each been sentenced to espionage purgatory for different reasons — because they screwed up or no one wants to work with them or they crossed the wrong person at headquarters — but they have in common that they’re often their own worst enemies. Or at least they are when their actual enemies aren’t trying to kill them.
The show’s winningly rumpled spirit is epitomized in Slough House’s boorish but shrewd chief, Jackson Lamb. Portrayed with gruff by Gary Oldman, Lamb is a belching alcoholic who looks out for his employees when he isn’t verbally abusing them. Earlier in the series, Lamb, called by dark circumstances to rally his team with some rousing Churchillian rhetoric, instead offered: “You’re f***ing useless, the lot of you. Working with you has been the lowest point of a disappointing career.”
The members of Lamb’s team are equally idiosyncratic. The ambitious River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) has a habit of going overboard and accidentally maiming fellow British officers. The prickly Louisa Guy (Rosalind Eleazar) is grieving her boyfriend through emotionally detached sex with strangers. Marcus Longridge (Kadiff Kirwan) is a gambling addict. Shirley Dander (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) has anger problems. And the team’s tech wizard, Roddy Ho (a scene-stealing Christopher Chung), is just all-around insufferable: In one of this season’s funniest moments, we learn that his overcompensating mode of transport is a bright blue wannabe muscle car with an incongruous automatic gearbox and a vanity license plate reading “BIG ROD.”
A recurring theme of Slow Horses is combat, sometimes bureaucratic, sometimes more literal, between the Slow Horses and their higher-ups in MI5, particularly Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas), James “Spider” Webb (Freddie Fox), and Ingrid Tierney (Sophie Okonedo), who undermine or sacrifice the Slow Horses for their own cold and sinister purposes. The first season involved a disastrous MI5 false-flag operation that led to a far-right group taking an innocent Muslim man hostage. The second entailed more intra-government treachery, as well as Russian espionage in the heart of London.
The latest season opens with Lamb’s put-upon assistant, the quiet Catherine Standish (Saskia Reeves), being snatched by an armed group. Her abductors’ larger motives are mysterious, but they threaten to kill her and others unless they get access to a tranche of old and seemingly useless classified documents. And we’re off to the races, with a typically tense and convoluted plot smattered with intrigue, action, and a slightly shocking character death.
Slow Horses seems determined to up the ante a bit for its third outing. The pacing of the opening episodes is more frantic than slow burn, and the season culminates in a shootout set piece slightly bigger and more Die Hard-esque than those of the previous seasons. Thankfully, the show takes pains to ensure we never confuse its protagonists for James Bond. Lest we forget, they’re all in Slough House for a reason.
The show’s sensibility is perfect for its upper-middle-brow home on Apple TV+: slicker and wittier than network potboilers in the 24 or CSI vein without trying to be quite as grittily realistic as something like The Wire or the peerless French spy drama The Bureau. In its deft balance of humor and vaguely ripped-from-the-headlines spy suspense, Slow Horses reminds me a bit of the wry and delightful recent series The Family Man (Amazon Prime), about a middle-class Indian intelligence officer fighting terrorism plots even as he struggles at home to get his wife and children to respect him.
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One of the charms, but also limitations, of making a spy series about MI5, a domestic intelligence agency in contrast to MI6 and others, is that it roots the action within England. Slow Horses’s new season opens with an atmospheric Istanbul sequence that injects energy and plot context but also feels like a slight bait and switch. We’re soon firmly back in London for most of the subsequent episodes. The show makes good use of its British locations — you can almost smell the doner kebab dribbling down Lamb’s shirt as he tramps along a gray street — but Slow Horses might benefit from finding ways to broaden its settings, just as The Family Man has found ways to bring characters to or from occupied Kashmir, Tamil Tiger territory in Sri Lanka, the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier, and the like.
Similarly, the machinations of the plot are often internal, with the enemies and conflict provided by MI5 itself rather than existential threats. While it is a relief in some ways to be free of, say, the stock Islamist villains of the “war on terror” era, the show sometimes feels like it lacks stakes. That said, Slow Horses’s willingness to kill off characters and traffic in ticking time bomb tension does partly ameliorate that structural weakness. These are minor quibbles, however. Slow Horses is clever, well paced, sure of its own voice, and more than a little addictive.
J. Oliver Conroy’s writing has been published in the Guardian, New York magazine, the Spectator, the New Criterion, and other publications.
