Slow Horses

“Slow Horses” is a top-notch British espionage series with a superb cast, gripping vigor, and man, I cannot wait for more.

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.

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.

Slow Horses shifts into high gear with grisly twists aplenty. [11 - 24 Apr 2022, p.7]

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.

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.

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.

Everything complements everything else and makes it more interesting, rather than the humor making the plot feel dumb, or the life-and-death stakes making the gags seem in poor taste.

“Slow Horses” is ostensibly a comedy, but it also works as a thriller, a terrorism procedural and a humanist study—there’s not an uninteresting character in the show, not even among the Albion offspring.

It’s solidly entertaining, well-acted and well-plotted. Little details from the books (such as Slough House’s Barbican location) are accurately represented.

A grimily authentic espionage yarn populated by a bunch of funny, intriguing “losers, misfits and boozers”, as they’re described in the lyrics of the wonderfully atmospheric Mick Jagger theme song.

Setups, compromised motives and sharp repartee abound. The show has a dark and wonderfully tangy sense of humor, much of it thanks to Lamb.

“Slow Horses” melds a quick wit and vivid personality with a propulsive narrative that makes you want to seek out the source novels.

As these competitive, cynical spymasters keep changing the rules of the game, the Slow Horses maneuver through an increasingly fraught and dangerous series of challenges with an earnest, seriocomic clumsiness that keeps Spy Horses from taking itself too seriously.

Slow Horses is at its ultimate best when it focuses on Cartwright, Lamb, and Scott Thomas's Diana Taverner. ... If the series trimmed the fat, it would succeed at being a lot more compelling.

It’s not a show destined for obscurity like some of the characters it prizes most, but there’s a still a little room left to hone its strengths.

Slow Horses has a bit of a generic case at its center, and it feels like some members of the Slough House team get short shrift, at least at first. But Oldman’s presence elevates our interest in just how everyone who works at Slough House actually got there.

The series’ material is far stronger as a thrilling spy comedy than the intense spy drama vibe that ends up fueling director James Hawes’ most kinetic (and admittedly impressive) sequences. Combining both sensibilities is smart, and when it works, it really works.

The show around Oldman is not entirely up to the standards set by his performance, but it’s not too far off — “Slow Horses” is a highly satisfying celebration and sendup of the John le Carré novels that clearly inspired it.

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.