Only two shows have ever induced me to subscribe to Apple TV: “Masters of the Air” and “Slow Horses.” If you have not seen the former, you are missing out. The show allows modern viewers to grasp something of the unfathomable bravery and skill of the young men of the “Bloody 100th,” the 100th Bombardment Group (Heavy) of the U.S. Eighth Air Force, who undertook risky bombing missions over Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II. At the opposite end of the entertainment spectrum stands “Slow Horses.” Where “Masters of the Air” showed impossibly beautiful flyboys in their leather flying suits aboard their B-17 “Flying Fortress” bombers, doing unimaginably courageous things, “Slow Horses” showcases a shabby aesthetic where one can almost smell the sweat, decay, and general grubby despair of contemporary Britain.
When the first season of “Slow Horses” dropped in 2022, my initial reaction was, “No, thanks.” Why would I watch a show full of failures and anti-heroes, chief among them being Gary Oldman’s alcoholic and flatulent Jackson Lamb? I like my entertainment to be at least somewhat entertaining and much prefer the pretty and heroic of “Masters of the Air” to the seedy and depressing of Lamb and his flock of failed spies. However, the teenage son of friends of mine told me I would enjoy it, and I signed up for Apple TV and was immediately hooked. So began the ritual of my rejoining Apple TV whenever a new season comes out, only to unsubscribe once the season is over. I’ve just signed up again: Season 6 is now releasing weekly episodes.
The show’s premise is brilliant. Based on a series of novels by Mick Herron, it follows the exploits and misadventures of a bunch of spies in MI5 (the U.K. equivalent of the FBI), who have been exiled from the organization’s headquarters in London’s Regent’s Park (known as “the Park”) to a run-down office block in another part of the city. The reasons for their banishments vary, and a satisfying part of the show is trying to guess why they have been booted out as the showrunners drip-feed the details.
One character was relegated for leaving sensitive information on a train, one for being an alcoholic, another for sending an unwise “round robin” office email, and one for losing a cache of weapons she had been tracking. Tech genius Roddy Ho didn’t commit any career mishaps but was simply so arrogant and personally offensive that no one could bear to work with him. The higher-ups within MI5 determined that for national security reasons, this bunch of walking disasters should be archived together, near enough so the Park could keep an eye on them, but far enough away from the action that they could do no further damage.
They are given no real work, just boring paperwork or low-stakes surveillance, all the while supervised by the biggest anti-hero of them all, Gary Oldman’s Jackson Lamb. However, Lamb is not a failed spy but one burned out by heroic work during the Cold War who has chosen to mothball himself. One of the funniest jokes of the show is that he remains an incredibly good spy, and whenever he can sober up long enough to do some actual spying, he tends to save the day.
The show’s name, “Slow Horses,” is a wordplay on “Slough House,” the office block where these professional failures have been siloed. The name is not accidental. Slough itself is an ugly town outside of London, the sort of urban purgatory no one wants to live or work in, and is a national joke for all that is tatty and generally unappealing. During the heaviest days of the Blitz, when London was being pounded by German bombs, British poet John Betjeman penned the lines: “Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough! / It isn’t fit for humans now.” It is no coincidence that the original U.K. version of “The Office” was set on a Slough trading estate.
“Slow Horses” shares some of its cultural DNA with “The Office,” as once one strips away the national security aspects (basically the bits that involve running or shooting), it functions as a black comedy about working in “the office from hell.” The audience is introduced to this workplace horror show in the first season through the eyes of new arrival River Cartwright, played by Jack Lowden (currently a front-runner to be the new James Bond). River is a once-promising officer whose grandfather had been head of MI5. He seemingly disgraces himself during a live training exercise at the Park, which triggers his relegation to Slough House, and we see him struggling to cope with his horrifically unsympathetic new boss and insufferable new colleagues. We later learn that River was framed because he had stumbled upon a big secret involving a senior member of the Park, but his banishment to Slough House continues.
Even though River remains a good spy, he is perpetually unlucky, and “Slow Horses” also functions as a modern-day Greek tragedy, showing how misfortune trips up Slough House’s accident-prone inmates just as frequently as their incompetence. Poor River cannot catch a break, such as when a pot of pink paint catastrophically intervenes during an operation. The show’s Charlie Chaplinesque physical comedy is matched by its whip-smart and knowingly irreverent dialogue.
The best lines go to Gary Oldman’s Lamb, whose politically incorrect treatment of his staff is laugh-out-loud funny. He names two of his team — one struggling with a lottery ticket addiction and another with a cocaine habit — “scratch and sniff,” and he refers to part-Chinese Roddy Ho as “the Karate Kid.” He also frequently taunts office manager Catherine Standish, the de facto mother figure to her fellow Slough House exiles, with invitations to join him for a daytime tipple regardless of the fact that she is a recovering alcoholic. One scene in the newly released Season 6 sees Lamb giggling his way through a funeral eulogy.
Alongside being the least supportive boss ever — though he does save everybody’s lives on occasion — Lamb gives a whole new meaning to the term “toxic workplace,” with his greasy hair and food-stained clothes, constant smoking and drinking, and steady diet of gastrointestinal distress-inducing junk food. “Slow Horses” is not a show to watch right after a meal.
Another reason the show works is the cast it has assembled. Kristin Scott Thomas, her glacial beauty and cut-glass accent never better, plays Diana Taverner, senior spook at the Park, and the perfect dramatic foil to Lamb’s doughy excess and working-class “Estuary English” accent. Taverner’s perpetual frustration at being surrounded by a sea of strutting male incompetence means that Lamb becomes her unwelcome ally whenever genuine danger strikes. Oldman and Scott Thomas clearly love being on the show and working together. Oldman has referred to fellow cast members as “actors that you can play tennis with,” a phrase that evokes memories of those epic Federer-Nadal matches.
The arc of each season essentially covers the same dramatic ground: The “Slow Horses” bumble around getting into scrapes while a genuine national emergency or terrorist threat slowly emerges, which is eventually foiled in the show’s typically chaotic way. And this is where my one criticism of “Slow Horses” comes in. Two of the seasons have involved those current boogiemen of the cultural zeitgeist, “far-right white supremacists,” but thus far no plotline has dared to touch what is obviously the U.K.’s biggest genuine security threat, Islamic terrorism.
The newly released Season 6 seems to involve two mysterious (and white) characters systematically bumping off retired “Slow Horses.” It is true that Season 5 did feature a group of disaffected Libyans, but their motives were financial and not ideological. Yet the biggest terrorist plots the U.K. has faced during the 21st century, and the list is depressingly long, have all been from Islamic extremism.
On the one hand, I can sympathize with the showrunners of “Slow Horses,” none of whom, one imagines, would like to receive death threats or the automatic accusation of Islamophobia were they to realistically depict the nation’s biggest security threat. On the other hand, this omission not only makes the show feel hollow but also reeks of cowardice, however boundary-pushing the show’s dialogue is.
Returning briefly to “Masters of the Air” and the airmen of the Bloody 100th, one realizes how much we moderns have to be thankful for: Those pilots and aircrew did not choose the luxury of denial but instead named their era’s existential enemy and confronted it, irrespective of the cost. By contrast, “Slow Horses” is a brilliant show that is brave enough to offend everyone in the room except the ones posing the actual threat. It remains top-notch, addictive television; it’s just a pity its creators do not have half the backbone of the accident-prone spies they depict.
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Bridget Riley studied modern history at Oxford and completed a Ph.D. in medieval history at the University of Reading. She writes on history, culture, and the philosophy of religion.
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