There are a few no-miss TV pitches, shows that will be commissioned again and again until the light fades out of the sky: “coppers – what if there was a good one?”; “genius detective investigates a murder despite not quite being over their dead kid”; “we’ll never work out as a couple … unless?”; and, of course, “I’m a spy, but get this: one who breaks all the rules”. They won’t stop making them and I won’t stop watching them. And so I gleefully welcome season three of Slow Horses (Apple TV+, from 29 November).
It’s wild how good Slow Horses is, actually. We should be talking about it all the time. Gary Oldman is a standout – he looks so deliciously dreadful as Jackson Lamb, lank hair combed down with chipshop grease, a Fergie-red nose with pores the size of saucers, staggering around like a huge garlic bulb learned how to walk – but the cast is stacked with big hitters. Kristin Scott Thomas doing elegant-matriarch-with-mischief-in-her-eyes, Jack Lowden doing a particular flavour of strapping bloke who can deliver a punch but also a zinger, Christopher Chung’s enjoyably slimy computer nerd Roddy Ho, and I’ve never not liked Kadiff Kirwan in anything.
It would be easy for a British spy thriller on its third run-out to collapse in on itself – too many layers of lore, too much pressing fingers to ears and saying a million codewords, too much pressure to ramp up the chase scenes so they’re sprinting across the top of Blackfriars Bridge while followed by a military jet – but Slow Horses holds its nerve. The action scenes are just action-y enough that they don’t devolve into gun-blazing parody; the clue-discovering bits are always something you can believe a smart person could figure out; Oldman calls from a dirty old mobile phone, chewing a kebab, telling you with a mouthful of food that he already knew that hours ago, come on. There is just the right amount of looking at a watch and being worried by the time. The right amount of human-sounding dialogue in with all the espionage. When people jump off high things they actually hurt their ankle. Spy thrillers have become very digital over the last couple of decades, but I’m not sure anyone at Slough House even knows what an app is.
Perhaps that is the appeal of Slow Horses (which, if you missed the first two series, is about a team of spies who all got demoted out of MI5 for making errors on the job): the frequency with which they mess up. Watching an immaculate super-spy who never misses a clue, never loses a fight, always has sex and wears cool watches in European cities is fun at the cinema – you like your James Bond, don’t you? – but on the sofa it’s a different story altogether. Watching chase scenes that end with spies raggedly out of breath is much more fun. Jack Lowden’s character might make a claim for the least believable British man’s name ever forged on screen – “River Cartwright” – but he’s a fantastic self-saboteur, constantly getting snatched by enemies or being sneeringly loathed by his former MI5 colleagues. Each hour-long episode whirls by – there’s just the right number of characters turning up, eating an ice-cream and moaning about their job, to temper all the spy nonsense – and the grimy London setting looks, and this is a compliment, like an absolute shithole throughout. It’s just such fun.
What’s going on in this series, then? Oh, the usual stuff: someone wants a file, someone else doesn’t give it to them, abrupt phone calls are made, someone is tied to a chair; a secret, a “you know I can’t let you get away with that, don’t you?” reveal, a fake sniper red-dot, some very quick punches and an urgent meeting on a bridge. Gary Oldman slips a tail then turns a corner and gasps, that type of thing. And this would all be corny if Slow Horses wasn’t so crammed with charm – the conversations the characters have in between kidnap attempts are so good and textured that you can forgive any clanky spy trope they drop on you. TV isn’t that hard, is it? You just need to take an old genre and breathe some life into it by casting acting royalty then maybe throwing a tire-squealing car chase in there. If someone could do that next year with, “Ah, a fresh start in a new house! Hmm, new neighbour seems a bit strange” then I would appreciate it.
• This article was amended on 27 November 2023. Season three of Slow Horses is on Apple TV+ from 29 November, not 1 December as an earlier version said.
