The Cold War was largely an exercise in futility. Soviet spies surveilled American agents embedded in Russia; said American agents knew they were being stalked, recorded, and quietly threatened. Stateside, it was the same game of paranoia — and in the end, it’s hard to say what actual fruit was borne of it.
That irony is the one thing — maybe the only thing — that Ponies understands intimately. Peacock’s new spy series treats in the same tropes that any student of the subgenre would know with their eyes closed: The apartment is bugged! There’s a mole in the organization! Such reveals are hardly as interesting as they might have been 20 years ago — even Dane Walter (Adrian Lester), the head of the CIA’s Moscow brand, seems to understand that. “If all the spies on their side and the spies on our side were suddenly gone tomorrow, the world would carry on working just the same,” he astutely observes halfway through the season.
