Slow Horses review: Apple’s Gary Oldman spy thriller simply delivers

“What if a hyper-competent fictional archetype was actually just bad at their job?” is a tried and trusted setup. It’s usually mined for broad comedy: Think of Rowan Atkinson’s terrible James Bond spoof, Johnny English. It’s an easy route into parody, and the bathos and sight gags come naturally when your super-spy, or your vampire hunter, or your detective, is actually just a doofus.

Slow HorsesThe new British spy drama ‘The Observer’ is streaming live on Apple TV Plus. These spies aren’t idiots, necessarily. These spies are, however, fuck-ups. Maybe they drink too much, maybe they don’t have the nerves for it, maybe they made one unforgivable mistake. Maybe they’re just mediocre. They’re not bad enough to give the sack, but not good enough to give anything important to do.

Instead of trying to make this situation funny at work, Slow HorsesIt forces its unlikely heroes into an espionage thriller, and then asks them to continue. The results can sometimes be funny and undercut the pomposity. And sometimes they’re pretty sharp.

Slow Horses: What are they?

Photo by Apple TV Plus

Slow Horses is a fairly close adaptation of the 2010 spy novel of the same name by Mick Herron, the first in Herron’s “Slough House” series about a crew of underachieving spies in MI5, the domestic arm of the British intelligence services. Herron also wrote 10 books, giving Apple TV Plus plenty of material if it decides to go back to its well. Herron combines robust thriller plots with a sardonic, humorous tone and a John Le Carré-style fascination with the political treachery and practical tradecraft of the secret intelligence world. And Apple’s deep pockets have brought two big stars to the series: Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott-Thomas.

Who’s behind the show?

Slow HorsesWill Smith produced and wrote the book. ThisOne) A former comedian and a collaborator with Armando Ianucci for UK political humor It is thick and Ianucci’s follow-up take on U.S. politics, Veep. Apple might be hoping Smith is its own version of SuccessionJesse Armstrong, another Ianucci-adjacent British writer. He has a pessimistic worldview and a taste for absurdity. His tone is certainly a good match fOr Herron’s, and an aptitude for skewering the British political class will go a long way in the world of Slough House. But this isn’t Veep or Succession; it’s a mystery thriller, and a pretty good one.

What’s it about?

Photo by Apple TV Plus

Jack Lowden plays River Cartwright, a promising MI5 recruitment whose grandfather Jonathan Pryce is spy royalty. But when a training exercise ends in disaster, River finds himself banished to Slough House, a dingy purgatory for the Service’s unwanted strays, overseen by slobby has-been Jackson Lamb (Oldman).

Chafing at the menial tasks he’s given, and itching to serve his country, River’s curiosity is aroused when his deskmate Sid (Olivia Cooke) is sent to steal files from a right-wing journalist. Slough House isn’t usually trusted to run operations, so why now? Why is Sid at Slough House so capable? What game are the much slicker spooks at Regent’s Park, the head office ruled by Diana Tavener (Scott-Thomas), playing? Lamb seems as careless as it appears.

When a Pakistani-born student is kidnapped and paraded in a livestream, right-wing terrorists threaten to behead him. River resolves to do something, and the other “Slow Horses” get dragged into it — including Lamb, who, as Tavener warns darkly, is “burned out for a reason” and may not be as incompetent as he seems.

What’s Slow Horses really about?

Above all else, Slow Horses is about living with the ghost of Le Carré. It’s about finding a way to make the sort of grounded, politically pointed, exquisitely twisty spy thrillers of which Le Carré was the undisputed master work in a modern world. The producers surely cast Gary Oldman, in part, to summon the memory of his performance as George Smiley (scientifically proven to be the greatest British fictional spy) in the 2011 film of Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

So it’s about intelligence war rooms dominated by huge multi-screen displays. It’s about clandestine meetings in empty cricket grounds. It’s about intelligence briefings with testy politicians. It’s about dead drops, and burn boxes, and encrypted files, and picking phones out of trash cans, and large men with earpieces stepping out of black SUVs. It’s about sparing but quite shocking moments of violence. It’s about every character having an uncertain motivation, and an even more uncertain fate.

Photo by Apple TV Plus

The intelligence community’s scurrilous operations are causing it to scrape by. Slow Horses This book does explore a larger topic, namely sickness and division within the modern British body politic. Le Carré used the international espionage of MI6 to examine Britain’s place in the world and cast a mournful eye on its history. Slow Horses uses MI5’s domestic agenda to look inward at the fault-lines in British society and the way unscrupulous journalists, politicians — and, yes, spies — are exploiting them for their own ends.

Slow horses are good for you?

Slow HorsesThis is a well-constructed, purposeful spy thriller which hits all the right notes. It is both satisfyingly complex and unpredictably unpredictable, without becoming overwhelmingly labyrinthine. It’s expertly paced, and Smith’s scripts balance cutting humor with a real sense of danger and a hint of moral backbone.

Despite the splashy cast, this isn’t a particularly ambitious show, and it notably doesn’t think it’s high cinema. British TV is full of six-episode dramas that are well-crafted and well-produced. Line of DutyAnd Happy ValleyThe only thing that differentiates them is their ). Slow Horses from the rest of them is the magnitude of the stars and a certain visual gloss brought by Apple’s budget. That’s a good thing; this recipe for TV potboilers doesn’t need to be messed with. You need to give it twists, but not just any twists. It also needs to have a sense and place of urgency. Slow Horses All of this, and James Hawes is a television veteran who knows how to maximize them.

While Oldman may have been cast for his buttoned-down Smiley, here he’s back in a mode he spent much of his early career in — cursing obnoxiously in a thick London accent — and he’s clearly relishing playing to type. Scott-Thomas is a similar character, glibly clicking along shiny corridors and giving orders to subordinates. It’s slick and refined. These aren’t profound characters, but they are fun archetypes.

It is their motley crew that gives this show its soul. Comfort TV is made possible by the comfort of watching these characters overcome their flaws.

Where and when can Slow Horses be viewed?

You can watch the first episode on Apple TV Plus right now. Every Friday, new episodes of the 6-episode series are added.