The third season of “Slow Horses” finally earned nine well-deserved Emmy nominations this summer, including best drama series and best dramatic actor. All I want to know is: What took so long?
For the past two years, whenever someone asked me what they should watch next, I always said, “Slow Horses.” I’m sharing this advice just in time for season four, which premieres Wednesday on Apple TV+.
But most of my listeners had never heard of the show, which says something about Apple’s marketing strategy but more about the cutting-edge technology that characterizes it. There was a time, and not so long ago, when a television series co-starring Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas, last seen together as Winston and Clementine Churchill in the Oscar-winning film “Darkest Hour,” would have made headlines.
These days, Americans have become quite accustomed to Oscar- and Olivier-winning actors appearing on television. Although perhaps not on a show like “Slow Horses.”
Because there is no other show like “Slow Horses.” Based on a series of novels by Mick Herron, its charm is so multi-genre and multi-dimensional, so slapstick and stealthy, romantic and cynical, that it’s hard to describe.
“Just watch it,” I told people who asked me why I thought they would like it. “Once you meet Jackson Lamb, you’ll understand. It won’t take long.”
Lamb, played by Oldman (clearly having the time of his life), is a legendary MI5 agent who, for reasons as yet unrevealed, has been banished from the agency's posh headquarters in the Park to a shack above a tent miles away known as Slough House.
Slough House is the place where MI5 sends agents it can't fire but really hopes will quit; Lamb serves as the alarming spectre of the rejects' future if they try to hold on.
An aggressively flatulent image of unpatched socks, rumpled shirts and an indescribably greasy trench coat, Lamb is invariably surrounded by whisky bottles and mouldy remains of Chinese takeaway. He is dismissive of his long-suffering office boss, Catherine Standish (the great Saskia Reeves) – “It’s Saturday,” he tells her at one point. “Haven’t you got any other people’s cats to steal?” – and he spouts off insults (“I’ve got haemorrhoids that are more useful than you”) with a poetic fluency last seen in Archie Bunker, made all the more stinging by the cultured vocabulary and London accent.
Lamb’s equally misfit crew is known around the park as the “slow horses,” and Lamb perks up only to remind them that they’re there to do nothing. “If I find out that you’re participating in extracurricular activities that might upset the balance of this blessed sanctuary,” he explains early on, “then I’ll make you wish you were in a Siberian gulag.”
In this case, he's specifically targeting River Cartwright (Jack Lowden), whose appearance at Slough House kicks off the series' action. The grandson of a former MI5 director, River is a whiz kid at the agency who falls from grace after botching a massive training facility, resulting in a deadly (if imaginary) bombing.
As his grandfather (Jonathan Pryce) counsels patience, River grows angry at Lamb's imposed apathy and rallies the other “horses” into action, including Lamb himself, who must once again put his still-formidable skill set to work to protect his team from threats both external and internal to the agency.
Jack Lowden as River Cartwright in “Slow Horses.”
(Apple TV+)
Lamb's interactions with MI5's manipulative “second desk” Diana Taverner (Scott Thomas) are a masterclass in attack and parry, as well as impeccable acting.
He also has to save the slow horses from themselves, more than occasionally. They are a scrappy bunch, but wildly flawed. In season four, they include Roddy (Christopher Chung), a computer genius, a man-child who prides himself on himself; the tenacious but emotionally unstable Louisa (Rosalind Eleazar); Shirley (Aimee Ffion-Edwards), a street-smart drug addict; and the kindly Marcus (Kadiff Kirwan), whose career in tactical operations was derailed by his gambling addiction.
“Bringing people up to speed is like trying to explain Norway to a dog,” Lamb says at one point, and he’s not entirely wrong.
Mistakes are made regularly and the death toll is high; “Slow Horses,” often shocking in its choices, does not shy away from sacrifice. But with a witty, warm script and a cast of excellent actors that lasts for days (special mentions to Naomi Wirthner as Molly, the MI5 librarian, and Samuel West as the cowardly politician Peter Judd), the whole is a spectacular sum of its parts.
A heady mix of classic spy thriller, personal recovery drama and workplace comedy, with shades of office romance (young people will pair off), “Slow Horses” has something for just about everyone.
On a metatextual level, the show is itself a masterful feint. Handsome, intelligent, and, at its core, kind, Lowden’s River has the word “hero” written all over him, and he is undoubtedly the engine that drives the action. River’s attempts to foil various would-be conspiracies and prove himself to be the spy everyone once believed him to be continually reveal the sordid and often corrupt machinations of MI5, while also infusing energy into his dispirited, disaffected but not entirely untalented colleagues at Slough House.
But “Slow Horses” belongs to Oldman. Not just because his Lamb is a messy, fascinating figure who gets all the best lines, but because he is suspicious of heroism, or at least its performative aspects. Lamb is not a legendary spy who has let himself go. He is a legendary spy who has come to understand that legends are built to deceive, to divert people’s attention from all the dirty work, the ugly compromises and the subsequent cover-ups that go into gaining and maintaining political power.
He's cynical, to be sure, and he's disillusioned, but mostly he's tired. Like many of us, Lamb has become so exhausted trying to navigate the quicksand of “us and them” rhetoric and morality that he no longer sees the point. Why not embrace apathy when life's “winners” are as flawed as its “losers”?
The reluctant hero is not a new character; bringing a warrior out of retirement is a popular narrative device. But right now, and in the hands of this actor and writing team, Jackson Lamb, even more wrinkled than Columbo and just as wily, has an everyman quality that puts him not in opposition to James Bond or Ethan Hunt from “Mission: Impossible,” but out of their league entirely.
When Lamb forces himself to come through, whether in a verbal sword dance with Taverner (Scott Thomas) or a more physical display of espionage, it's not just surprising, it's inspiring.
This isn't a man trying to shake off banishment or prove to himself that he still has talent. He knows he's good at what he does, even a weaponized fart. He just needed to be reminded that even if there's no real hope of changing a world overrun by ego, stupidity, and corruption, it's worth the effort. It may be exhausting and pointless, in the grand scheme of things. People will still die, lie, and make selfish or stupid decisions.
But there is always good work to be done, even if it is just clearing a little space so that slow horses can learn to run.
