Why ‘Slow Horses’ Is the Thoroughbred of TV Shows

Amid the continued and persistent rumors as to who is going to be the next James Bond, Sir Gary Oldman has cheerily weighed in with his opinion. “It’s been rumored that he’s on the shortlist,” the Oscar-winning actor said. “We’re going to find out pretty soon, aren’t we? Because they have picked him. They have made their choice, but they have not announced it yet. So my fingers are crossed for Jack [Lowden].” The actor’s loyalty towards his “Slow Horses” co-star Mr. Lowden is mirrored by a growing sense that the 36-year-old Scotsman is the frontrunner for the part of the next 007, leapfrogging the likes of Callum Turner and Jacob Elordi in the process.It is not hard to see why. Just as Matthew Vaughn’s “Layer Cake” made for a highly efficient audition for Daniel Craig’s (largely) successful stint as Bond, so Mr. Lowden’s performance over the past five seasons of “Slow Horses“ as the disgraced MI5 agent River Cartwright functions beautifully both as an indication of what the actor will bring with a license to kill and shaken, not stirred, martinis, and, more crucially, a range he possesses beyond that.The splendidly named River (hippie mother) is partially a top-notch agent who has been unfairly sequestered to the grubby purgatory of Slough House along with the other disgraced spies, the so-called “Slow Horses,” led by Oldman’s vile but brilliant super-agent Jackson Lamb. He does plenty of running, jumping and fighting that shows that he will be more than capable of battling villains in the Bond universe if this is to be his future calling. But the character is also rash and impetuous, given to making often egregious mistakes because he believes in his own intelligence, and lands in trouble as a result. In the universe of “Slow Horses,” he is less super-spy and often more super-pest. As Lamb growls at one point, “You might think you’re hot stuff, Cartwright, but in fact you’re cold shit.”As the spy series, based on Mick Herron’s excellent novels, returned for its sixth season on Apple TV this week, it occupies a rare, if not unique, position in contemporary television drama. When it began in 2022, having filmed its first and second series back-to-back in that strange period in the pandemic when the show had to frequently stop and start production because of Covid infections — and yet still pulled off a huge, appropriately Bond-esque opening set-piece in which River tries and fails to apprehend a terrorist at an airport, only for the eventual resolution to be quite unexpected — it was not an overnight success.The presence of Oldman, the veteran star Jonathan Pryce (as River’s dementia-afflicted grandfather) and the ever-excellent Kristin Scott Thomas as Diana Taverner, the steely second-in-command at “The Park,” MI5’s headquarters proper, obviously guaranteed a degree of interest, but the worry was that the show was too British, too cynical. and too damn grubby to engender the interest that it merited.Despite laudatory reviews and a decent selection of awards nominations, mainly for Oldman and showrunner Will Smith, it was not until the third series in 2023 that the series really caught the public imagination. This was partly because it ended with an extended, two-episode action scene that sets the denizens of Slough House against the Park’s security forces, “the Dogs,” to thrillingly visceral effect. But it was also because Apple’s significant budgets — each show costs around $100 million for six episodes, an amount unimaginable for the BBC or similar public-service broadcaster — have given it a gloss that means that audiences who are starved of Tom Cruise’s heroics in “Mission: Impossible” or indeed the presence of James Bond on screen (fittingly, the entire show has been broadcast since the appearance of the last 007 film, “No Time To Die,” in cinemas) are able to get their espionage fix of twisty plots, larger-than-life characters, and, when it comes, explosive action in some style.Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott-Thomas in ‘Slow Horses.’ Apple TVStill, there are endless numbers of big-budget espionage shows on the streaming services, whether you want the mindless grandeur of “Citadel” or the far more intense machinations of “The Bureau.” What makes “Slow Horses” so distinctive, and reflects the original novels so well, is how funny it is. Smith, who has now departed as showrunner, began his career as a stand-up comedian who was once referred to as “the Hugh Grant of comedy” and then moved into writing and acting duties both on the British political comedy “The Thick of It and then on its American successor “Veep.”As both of those shows excelled at delving beneath the carefully polished façade of institutions to show the chaos and backbiting underneath, so “Slow Horses” has done the same for MI5. It is, of course, far from the first spy saga to have offered a cynical account of the things that people do on behalf of their country; John le Carré’s novels begot both the Alec Guinness “Smiley” series that appeared in the Seventies and Eighties to unforgettable effect and then, subsequently, Oldman prefigured Jackson Lamb with his subtle work as Smiley in the Tomas Alfredson film of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” in 2011. But for all le Carré’s undeniable intelligence and moral ambivalence, you would neither read his books nor watch their television adaptations expecting laughs.And laughs, in giddy abundance, are what the last five seasons of “Slow Horses” have provided. Many of them come from some of the most indelible characters, such as Christopher Chung’s imbecilic, arrogant tech bro Roddy Ho or Aimee Ffion-Edwards’s Shirley Dander, a coked-up agent whose immense bursts of anger threaten to turn her into the British answer to the Incredible Hulk at any given moment. And then there’s the more recent addition, Tom Burke’s silent, PTSD-haunted J.K Coe, who was responsible, along with River, for one of the funniest moments in the last series, when they inadvertently cause the death of a far-right politician who is killed by a falling pot of paint. The aftermath, involving an irate Lamb, is as hilarious as anything you will see on television.The new series, the first not to have Smith as showrunner, promises the usual mixture of mystery — Slough House’s not-so-finest are being murdered one by one, suggesting that someone has a residual grudge against the organization – with finely tuned wit and even, at times, a little pathos. I am especially looking forward to the closest that the show has towards a Moriarty figure, Hugo Weaving’s ex-CIA op-turned-mercenary Frank Harness, who just so happens, inconveniently enough, to be River’s father. And then after this, there will be a seventh season probably next year, based on Herron’s novel “Bad Actors,” and an eighth series is said to be filming at the moment, before the show’s breathless shooting schedule might need a pause. This is partly due to an absence of material – the most recent novel, “Clown Town” was only published last year – and partly because one of its stars might well find himself being summoned up for work by the other spy franchise that will be returning to cinemas in a couple of years.Sources close to the show say “Slow Horses” will continue as long as Gary Oldman wants to still act in it. For now, the return of “Slow Horses” will be, for the discerning viewer, the televisual event of 2026. Laughs, violence, spies, and political satire — what’s not to love?

Why ‘Slow Horses’ Is the Thoroughbred of TV Shows

Why ‘Slow Horses’ Is the Thoroughbred of TV Shows

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