Slow Horses

To its credit, the show manages to do a lot in six episodes: shocking detonations and frantic, drumbeat-scored fight sequences, but also expansive storytelling, detailed worldbuilding, and considered study of what working in intelligence does to people.

Slow Horses is up there with the very best of TV drama.

We’re into series four now and there is no drop in quality. If anything, each series improves slightly on the last. Watching it is pure pleasure. There isn’t a wasted scene or a duff piece of dialogue. Every performance is perfectly calibrated.

Slow Horses has not only turned in another thrilling season full of excitement and intrigue but an emotionally affecting one, too.

[Hugo] Weaving is a hypnotic and charismatic performer, and his growling American accent is pure ASMR fuel. .... As always, Slow Horses has very little fat, and each episode zips.

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.

Season 4 maintains the high quality of previous seasons.

Slow Horses continues to be ludicrously implausible, and I wish Lamb and Diana would verbally spar more often (it’s so rare it feels like script rationing), but it’s still got the touch.

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]

Just like Season 1, those personalities are so strong that we love seeing them interact with each other, even if the cases they’re working on aren’t that intriguing.

The temptation to celebrate the show for Oldman’s central performance – as corpulent and corrupt as ever – belies its evolution into one of the most consistent, and consistently enjoyable, shows on TV.

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.

Look past the deceptively expensive shabby chic and the faultless direction, and Slow Horses is, often, sticking closely to genre tropes. But it never lets itself go stale, and the new episodes benefit from new blood in what is already a luxuriously fine cast.

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.

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.

Darkly funny and tighter than the buttons on Lamb’s sauce-stained shirt, this is yet another outstanding season for Apple’s brilliantly unconventional spy series.

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.