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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
84
Mixed:
5
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
The TelegraphSep 4, 2024
Dec 20, 2023
Season 3 Review:
They can be loyal to one another, and even heroic, if not in a way that their bosses will ever recognize. This might make for a depressing real-world status quo, but on Slow Horses, it translates into exemplary television: the most unlikely champions saving the day (and themselves) in ways that only we, the viewers, can truly appreciate.
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ColliderNov 29, 2023
Season 3 Review:
Season 3 of Slow Horses presents a main story that escalates and derails in the best way possible. Not only does it engagingly involve all characters in the story, but we can also understand and appreciate the personal stakes for everyone, which makes it extremely compelling from beginning to end.
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The TelegraphNov 20, 2023
Season 3 Review:
The drama makes great use of its London setting, filmed in and around the Barbican, and there are funny little touches that only a British show would include, such as the bungling head of security at MI5’s Regent’s Park headquarters dunking a KitKat Chunky into his cup of tea. As ever, the writing is top quality, particularly the insults.
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ColliderNov 29, 2022
Season 2 Review:
It really is an absolute thrill ride and a joy to watch. Season 2 takes what worked in the first season and expands upon it exponentially. With nearly every episode ending on a cliffhanger, your only complaint may be that you have to wait another week to see what happens next.
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IndieWireSep 24, 2025
The PlaylistAug 21, 2024
Season 4 Review:
There’s so much plot and character in the fourth chapter of “Slow Horses” that it’s almost difficult to keep up with what’s happening, but that’s partially by design. It’s a season clearly meant to reflect not just the confusion of David Cartwright’s shaky memory, but the sense that all of the power structures in this world are built on foundations of buried secrets that are always threatening to tumble out. It’s rarely been more entertaining to watch them fall.
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Mar 25, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Slow Horses’s first season is chock full of characters, lines, and moments that will work brilliantly for fans of spy thrillers—not gritty spy thrillers, not action-packed spy thrillers, but straight-laced, classic, by-the-book ones. ... This conventional addition to an already crowded genre counts as a confirmed kill.
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Screen RantOct 2, 2025
Season 5 Review:
Slow Horses is unafraid to stick with what makes it unique. Few shows weave together competing storylines so effectively, stopping and starting just as our attention wanes. Even the brief crumbs about male rage and violent rhetoric inspiring violent political acts are cleverly, but clearly, woven in.
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Nov 29, 2023
Season 3 Review:
Slow Horses is sharply written at every twist and turn. Forceful, funny, and conspiratorial, it’s constantly finding new ways into spy thriller dynamics while showcasing the terrific work of its cast and letting Gary Oldman just completely go off as the jaded, aged spy at its center.
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Nov 29, 2023
Season 3 Review:
Somehow, the Slow Horses continue to be plausible as both bumblers and authentic heroes, and this third TV season maintains the balance even more gracefully than the hugely charming previous installments. It’s Dad TV done at a high level, now arguably even higher than before.
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Nov 29, 2023
Season 3 Review:
"Slow Horses" has thus far found its success doling out memorable characters and tightly coiled plotlines in equal proportions. It is much the same in season 3, save for an overture that rivals a James Bond movie in its length and convolutions, and an ending that, well, rivals a James Bond movie in its amount of firepower and death by gunplay.
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Dec 2, 2022
Dec 2, 2022
Season 2 Review:
In some ways it feels like the show’s writers heard the faint criticism of the first season, attempted to course correct, and ended up with a narrative that tries to be sneaky and comes up just short. And yet, it does little to take away from the show’s innate charms.
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Apr 5, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Slow Horses hardly reinvents the wheel, mostly comfortable with recycling spy-story archetypes with a few minor twists here and there. But when it’s this entertaining, and you get to hear Gary Oldman curse people out with ridiculously-complex bon mots in between fish-and-chips toots, it’s hard to complain about the end product.
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Oct 14, 2025
Season 5 Review:
The mystery of the villain this season is intriguing, and culminates in a hugely satisfying twist in later episodes. That being said, some viewers will become impatient with that dynamic and miss the presence of a big baddie like Weaving’s, plotting schemes and chewing up scenery. .... But best of all is the surprisingly effective melancholy giving bite to the dark humored banter between the main Slough House cast.
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Sep 24, 2025
Season 5 Review:
Slow Horses continues to be fun to watch because of Oldman’s crusty performance and the agents at Slough House working together so well despite not exactly being friends. It’s a chemistry that works for this show, and can sustain it for a number of seasons beyond this one.
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Sep 4, 2024
Season 4 Review:
It's an excellent spotlight for Lowden and Pryce, as well as Hugo Weaving as the latest bad guy, though it at times comes at the expense of the rest of the cast. Even Gary Oldman's delightfully flatulent Jackson Lamb gets a bit less to do than in previous seasons. .... But the mix of absurdity and suspense remains addictive. [Sep 2024, p.77]
Sep 4, 2024
Season 4 Review:
The pivot to personal is a bit of a shaky turn for a series that otherwise excels at both action and comedy. It’s easy to buy the disintegrating relationship between River and his ailing grandfather, or Lamb’s occasional affection for his team, but efforts toward developing relationships between some of the more minor characters ring hollow or overdone.
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The GuardianSep 4, 2024
ColliderAug 29, 2024
Season 4 Review:
There's a little difficulty in fitting the new threats and characters into the existing world in a balanced way, and it does at times feel like plotlines are left lingering too long. Quite a few of the slow horses are often unfortunately sidelined here, a feeling that's inescapably highlighted every time we revisit the team, but it remains a great season overall with some stellar surprises for new and returning viewers alike.
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Radio TimesAug 21, 2024
Season 4 Review:
The comedy's still wonderfully delivered and effectively deployed so as not to overwhelm the most serious moments, and the show's heart is perhaps more firmly on its sleeve than ever. Meanwhile, the relationships between the characters only get richer and more engaging with each outing.
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Nov 30, 2023
Season 3 Review:
“Slow Horses” is back for season 3 on Apple TV+, and it’s a joy. The story line is fine — it’s less twisty and cerebral than those of the previous two seasons, perhaps, which is fine. .... But the characters, and particularly Gary Oldman’s Jackson Lamb, are more entertaining than ever.
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Nov 29, 2023
Season 3 Review:
Although the third season develops some long-simmering storylines beautifully, treating a couple of slow, important arcs with the care they deserve, six episodes aren’t sufficient to bridge the massive consequences of this particular plot. .... It’s still a fun, drab, smelly, unexpected watch.
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Dec 6, 2022
Season 2 Review:
This time, the action begins with a former MI5 Cold War agent dead on a bus, and it spirals out from there into twists involving the sleeper agents and a possible terrorist attack. It’s complicated, but it’s worth it in the end, just like Lamb’s crime-solving methods.
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The TelegraphDec 2, 2022
Season 2 Review:
Oldman’s performance is a gem. ... It goes off the boil a bit at the end, as these things often do. But it’s solid entertainment. Jack Lowden taps into the low-key comic tone as River Cartwright, ostensibly the hero of the piece. Dustin Demri-Burns is a standout in this series as Min Harper, a nice guy but not the most competent of spies. Little touches give the show a fresh feel.
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Apr 1, 2022
Season 1 Review:
It has action, tense kidnapping scenes, a politically resonant and timely subtext, and a compellingly sour lead character — Oldman’s MI5 agent Jackson Lamb — who is as cynical and weary as he is brilliant. At moments, the story gets a little tangled, but ultimately, by the end of six episodes, it holds up.
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The IndependentApr 1, 2022
Season 1 Review:
There’s a sliver of familiar comic apathy that runs through it as a result; characters seem to speak in sighs, offsetting serious subject matter with dry wit. Unexpectedly, it all meshes well: the show never veers too far into levity as to overpower the drama, and vice versa.
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RogerEbert.comMar 31, 2022
Season 1 Review:
A show like this needs to find the right rhythm, a balance between character and espionage plotting, and it’s almost dead perfect here, at least when the show focuses on the Slow Horses—long scenes with the kidnappers, especially in later episodes, feel like they could have been shortened a bit, to be fair. It helps to have a cast who completely understood the assignment.
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Sep 16, 2025
Season 5 Review:
[Feels] thinner and, dramatically, less emotionally complex. Some of that is bound to happen when you take characters who have mostly been on the back burner and move them closer to the front. .... But that doesn’t make any of this less delightful to watch, maybe just less fulfilling.
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Sep 5, 2024
Season 4 Review:
If the show’s third season was unusually obsessed with guns, the violence here erupts with more thought and narrative purpose and it doesn’t overstay its welcome. As a series, “Slow Horses” doesn’t offer tightly plotted, clockwork spy stories; think too deeply about any of the details and the whole thing threatens to fall apart. But on a scene-by-scene basis, the writing is such a delicious combination of wry and tension-filled, and the cumulative effect is wonderfully entertaining.
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Nov 30, 2022
Season 2 Review:
Yes, you may need to watch the season twice to get a handle on how all the pieces fit together. ... The show (which has been renewed for two more seasons) has real energy. It’s funny and feels smart even when it’s not, with a focus on small and specific stories over the outsized global bombast that tends to dominate espionage stories at the moment.
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Mar 28, 2022RogerEbert.comSep 24, 2025
Season 5 Review:
It’s not a steep enough drop to allow for concern that the writers can’t immediately get it back in the 6th outing (and the preview for that at the end of this season is thrilling) but it lacks some of the spark of the best of the show, in part because of a rushed plot and the characters it chooses to highlight and sideline.
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Sep 13, 2024
Season 4 Review:
The performances are generally good, and Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas, as Lamb’s ruthlessly efficient, surreptitiously human boss, are great. And the writing continues to delineate the show’s colorful characters in quietly amusing ways. .... A larger problem, which the current season shares with the previous one, is that the external engines of the season’s story arc feel more forced and outlandish than before.
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Apr 1, 2022
Mar 31, 2022
Mar 30, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Smith and Hawes capture the gloomy desperation of Slough House, but they can’t quite crack the hostage plotline that is also the weakest portion of Herron’s book. ... Of course, when Slow Horses is finally able to let Oldman and Thomas go head-to-head, it’s every bit the clash of the titans you’d hope for.
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Nov 29, 2023
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