The sixth and final episode of Slow Horses’ fourth season lands on Apple TV+ today, giving me a flimsy excuse to urge you all to watch. It’s a pulpy, fun and gripping British spy thriller that has finally started to garner some deserved attention. At six episodes a run, it’s respectful of your time in a way plenty of other streaming series aren’t. And while it’s unafraid of showing you the brutal side of espionage, you can revel in its gloriously deathly sense of humor.
Slow Horses focuses on Slough House, a department inside Britain’s security service where agents are dumped. MI5 officers who can’t be trusted with real work, or angered their superiors, are dumped in the administrative purgatory. Since you can’t hand a spy a pink slip and send them on their way, they’re parked at Slough House until they retire, or quit.
The show stars Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb, the antithesis of anyone’s imagined vision of a real spy. Lamb is perpetually drunk, obsessed with his own bodily emissions and is unpleasant to be around. (As I said when the show started, Slow Horses delights in watching the once and hopefully-future George Smiley playing someone so grubby.)
He’s joined by Jack Lowden as River Cartwright, a would-be superspy and the scion of a great family of spymasters parked at Slough House for spoilery reasons. Of course, much as River may chafe at his exile, he’s not quite able to live up to his own expectations. Much like the rest of the team, that Lamb delights in tormenting, River lacks some top-tier spy talents.
Naturally, despite being a team of “losers, misfits and boozers,” Lamb and his crew are regularly drawn into MI5’s grander intrigues. This time around, a central London shopping center is blown up, which precipitates a rabid hunt for the culprit. Except this time, the answers aren’t in MI5’s hands, but the slow horses themselves, but that’s about as much as I can say.
Much as I love the world the series depicts, drawn from Mick Herron’s series of books, I adore its dialog. Creator Will Smith (not that one), who recently won the series’ first Emmy, worked on The Thick of It. The British sitcom is the progenitor for Veep, and also laid the groundwork for Succession; two series that also share a love for the almost operatic use of profanity.
A show like Slow Horses should be dominating the news cycle every single episode, but I think we all know why it remains in a smaller niche. That it’s on Apple TV+ certainly limits the number of people who are able to watch it and, by extension, fall in love with it. After all, despite having the world’s most well-heeled backer and access to every iPhone in the world, it still has a quarter of Netflix’s user figures.
But don’t let its platform hold you back, especially when you can pay for a month’s worth and watch all four seasons in a week, depending on your patience. It’s certainly worth it.
