The third season of “Slow Horses” finally got nine well-deserved Emmy nominations this summer, including for drama series and drama actor. All I want to know is: What took so bloody long?
For the past two years, whenever anyone has asked me what they should be watching next, I have invariably answered “Slow Horses.” Advice I now pass along to you just in time for the fourth season, which premieres Wednesday on Apple TV+.
But most of my listeners had never even heard of the show. Which says something about Apple’s marketing strategy but more about the state of the art form. 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 “The Darkest Hour,” would have made news.
Nowadays Americans have grown quite used to Oscar- and Olivier-winning performers showing up on TV. Though not, perhaps, in 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 cross-genre and multiquadrant, so slapstick and stealthy, romantic and cynical, that it’s difficult to describe.
“Just watch it,” I would say to those who asked why I think they’d like it. “As soon as 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 not yet revealed, has been banished from the agency’s sleek headquarters at the Park to a miles-away, over-a-shop hovel known as Slough House.
Slough House is where MI5 sends agents it can’t quite fire but truly hopes will quit; Lamb serves as the alarming specter of the rejects’ future if they try to hang on.
An aggressively flatulent vision of undarned socks, rumpled shirts and unspeakably greasy trench coat, Lamb is invariably surrounded by whiskey bottles and the moldering remnants of Chinese takeout. He is dismissive of his long-suffering office manager, Catherine Standish (the great Saskia Reeves): ”It’s Saturday,” he says to her at one point. “Don’t you have other people’s cats to steal?” And he wields insults — ”I have hemorrhoids that are more useful than you” — with a poetic fluency last seen in Archie Bunker, made even more stinging by the educated vocabulary and London accent.
Lamb’s equally misfit team are known in the Park as the “slow horses,” and Lamb rouses himself only to remind them that they are there to do nothing. “If I find out you are indulging in extracurricular activities that could upset the equilibrium of this blessed sanctuary,” he explains early on, “then I will make it so that you wish you were in a Siberian gulag.”
He is speaking, in this case, specifically to River Cartwright (Jack Lowden), whose appearance in Slough House kicks off the action of the series. The grandson of a former head of MI5, River is an agency golden boy who finds himself disgraced after he bungles a massive training scenario, resulting in a lethal (albeit imaginary) bombing.
While his grandfather (Jonathan Pryce) advises patience, River chafes against Lamb’s enforced apathy and rouses the other “horses” into action. Including, with many hilariously bitter protests, Lamb himself, who must reengage his still formidable set of skills to protect his team from threats from both outside and inside 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 master class in thrust and parry, as well as flawless acting.
He must also more than occasionally save the slow horses from themselves. They are a scrappy but wildly imperfect bunch. Going into Season Four, they include Roddy (Christopher Chung), a self-aggrandizing, man-child computer whiz; the dogged but emotionally unsteady Louisa (Rosalind Eleazar); Shirley (Aimee Ffion-Edwards), a streetwise drug addict; and the gentle Marcus (Kadiff Kirwan), whose career in tactical operations was derailed by a gambling habit.
“Bringing you people up to speed is like trying to explain Norway to a dog,” Lamb says at one point, and he is not entirely wrong.
Mistakes are regularly made and the body count is very high; “Slow Horses,” often shocking in its choices, does not shrink from sacrifice. But with witty, warm writing, and a cast of fine actors that goes on for days — special shoutouts to Naomi Wirthner as Molly, MI5 librarian, and Samuel West as dastardly politician Peter Judd — the whole is a spectacular sum of its parts.
A heady combination of classic spy thriller, personal reclamation drama and workplace comedy, with undertones of office romance — the young people will pair up — “Slow Horses” has something for almost everyone.
On a metatextual level, the show is itself a masterful feint. Handsome, smart and essentially kind, Lowden’s River has “hero” written all over him, and he is certainly the engine that drives the action. River’s attempts to thwart various potential plots, and prove he is the spy everyone once thought he could be, continually reveal the tawdry, often corrupt machinations of MI5 while energizing his discouraged, disgruntled yet not entirely untalented peers in Slough House.
But “Slow Horses” belongs to Oldman. Not just because his Lamb is such a messy, mesmerizing figure who gets all the best lines, but because he is suspicious of heroism, or at least the performative aspects of it. Lamb is not a legendary spy who has let himself go. He’s a legendary spy who has come to understand that legends are built to mislead, to draw people’s attention from all the wet work, awful compromises and subsequent cover-ups involved in gaining and maintaining political power.
He is cynical, certainly, and disillusioned, but mostly he is tired. Like many of us, Lamb has so exhausted himself trying to navigate the shifting sands of “us and them” rhetoric and righteousness that he no longer sees the point. Why not embrace apathy when life’s “winners” are just as flawed as its “losers”?
The reluctant hero is not a new character; prying a warrior out of retirement is a popular storytelling device. But at this moment, and in the hands of this actor and writing team, Jackson Lamb, even more rumpled than Columbo and just as canny, has an everyman quality that puts him not in opposition to James Bond or “Mission: Impossible’s” Ethan Hunt but outside their ken entirely.
When Lamb forces himself to come slouching through, whether in a verbal sword dance with Scott Thomas’ Taverner or with a more physical display of spycraft, it isn’t just surprising, it’s inspirational.
This is not a man trying to extricate himself from banishment or prove to himself that he’s still got game. He knows he’s good at what he does, down to a weaponized fart. He just needed to be reminded that even if there is no real hope of changing a world overrun with ego, stupidity and corruption, it’s still worth making an effort. It may be exhausting and pointless, in the grand scheme of things. People will still die, and lie, and make selfish or bone-headed decisions.
But there is always good work to be done, even if it’s just clearing a little space so the slow horses can learn to run.
