Slow Horses’ fifth season, now streaming, is another reminder of why the show has become one of AppleTV’s biggest audience hits. Based on a book series by Mick Herron, the show is pacy, funny, and boasts a murderer’s row of acting talent that includes Gary Oldman, Kristin Scott Thomas, Jonathan Pryce, and Hugo Weaving. It also walks a becoming line between topical and escapist: plot conceits are vaguely ripped from the headlines and stakes feel weighty, particularly since the show is willing to kill sympathetic characters, yet the show is set in a world that is lightly fictionalized enough to feel almost cozy. 

For those unfamiliar, the eponymous Slow Horses are a fictional branch of MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, based in a dilapidated London building called Slough House. (A sneering nickname — it is so far from headquarters it “might as well be in Slough.”) These agents are MI5’s castoffs, people banished from headquarters because of their incompetence, their personality problems, or because they crossed the wrong bigfoot. They’re kept around to undertake the missions that people in headquarters can’t be bothered to do — or, because of political sensitivities, don’t want to.