A cluster of espionage dramas premiered over the last few weeks and it’s a genre that works best when the ratio of “piecing things together” to “there will be blood” is weighted toward the brainier side of things. I’m fine with a soupcon of action and violence, so long as the main attraction is the thinking and squinting and figuring out where allegiances lie.
And that’s what you get in “Slow Horses,” the Apple TV+ adaptation of Mick Herron’s British spy novels. They have a distinctly wry John le Carre skepticism, reducing MI5 to little more than a bumbling viper’s nest, with a disheveled Gary Oldman as an aging, pit-stained spy whose instincts are still sharp as ever. There’s real humor to be found in the show’s serpentining stories. Season 2 dropped at the end of November, just a little more than six months after Season 1. That’s a fast turnaround, even for streaming. Two more seasons are on the way.
“The Recruit,” which bowed on Netflix last month, is something of an American equivalent in the way it similarly refuses to portray an intelligence service — in this case, the CIA — as an agency staffed by only the clear-eyed and morally uncompromised. Quite the opposite. And the series has its own brand of humor fueling a story that isn’t centered on overblown world-ending threats, but has compelling stakes all the same. A former Russian double agent (Laura Haddock) is languishing in a Phoenix prison. She wants out and she’s threatening to spill the names of American spies working in Europe if the CIA doesn’t pull some strings.
