Slow and Steady

Time for another entry in my unofficial recurring series, Reasons You Should Subscribe to Apple TV+. Today's topic: Slow Horses.

Slow Horses is a British spy thriller based on the Slough House series of novels by Mick Herron. It's centered on a group of agents who have all made mistakes while working for MI5. Those in charge don't want to fire these "slow horses," but neither do they want them anywhere near a sensitive case. So they're exiled to an administrative purgatory of an assignment, under the oversight of a crotchety old agent. Yet trouble has a way of finding them.

There's something about Slow Horses that evokes much of what I loved about the show 24 back in its original run. It's exhilarating and tense, and has a number of characters you quickly come to care about. But Slow Horses also jettisons some of the baggage that 24 developed over time. In proper British fashion, its seasons are just 6 episodes, each one based on one of Herron's original novels. So from the outset, the story knows where it's going and never has to vamp for time. It doesn't glorify torture, and the stakes are plausibly contained.

The people making it are clearly having fun and want to be making it, evidenced by just how much of the show there's going to be. Slow Horses was (once again, in British fashion) originally commissioned for just two seasons, and those were filmed back to back. But in very short order after the premiere of the first season, the show was picked up for two more seasons (also to be filmed back to back), based on the next two books of the series.

Heading the cast as surly Jackson Lamb is Gary Oldman, coming to TV for the first time. He excels as a prickly curmudgeon. (With a heart of gold? Inside a heart of coal, maybe.) Kristin Scott Thomas (no stranger to spy thrillers, if you've watched The Bodyguard) plays a high-ranking MI5 officer keeping the Slow Horses at arm's length. Amid the more "fresh young faces" in the cast, there's also Olivia Cooke (who shined in the debut season of House of the Dragon). And Jonathan Pryce recurs as the grandfather of the "hero agent" in the group, and himself a retired spy.

All that, and a catchy-as-hell original song performed by Mick Jagger for the opening theme? Slow Horses has become the latest in a long list of shows I give people, saying: "when you do sign up for Apple TV+ for a while, watch all of this." I give it an A-. I can't wait for season three.